The User-Agent is being deprecated in Google Chrome.
Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent stringhttps://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/-2JIRNMWJ7s/yHe4tQNLCgAJ
We cannot use matomo tag manager because of our privacy policy, so we will analyze it based on the access log.
If anyone knows if matomo will support headers such as sec-ch-ua in the future, please provide information.
Lukas
June 26, 2020, 11:01am
2
Hi,
I thought I wrote about this before, but it seems like I didn’t. So I summed up the current situation here:
opened 10:59AM - 26 Jun 20 UTC
Enhancement
Critical
(I thought I wrote about this before, but couldn't find an issue)
The Chrome … team is working on a large change that plans to deprecate the user-agent string.
The current(?) Chrome 83 already freezes the string and Chrome 85 will unify it to one common string for all desktop and one for all mobile users.
As a replacement the client hints standard is proposed: https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints
This allows to get similar data about a device already separated by things like brand, browser, os, etc. (meaning device-detector would not be needed anymore).
There is both an HTTP header (that only returns non-vague results if the server requests them) and a JS API for accessing the data.
### Things that might complicate this:
#### the main UA value is not a string, but a list/set
`Chrome"; v="73", "ChromiumBasedBrowser"; v="60", "Chromium"; v="73"` (and the corresponding dictionary from JS) is a valid response and browser vendors are encouraged to "randomly [include] additional, intentionally incorrect, comma-separated entries with arbitrary ordering".
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It seems like at the moment only Chromium-based browsers are working on implementing this standard, but as it seems like these are by far the majority now, that doesn't really matter.
I added this to 4.0 RC for now as it impacts every Matomo user as the most popular user agent will display incorrect results.
Links:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/-2JIRNMWJ7s/yHe4tQNLCgAJ
https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5995832180473856
https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints
https://wicg.github.io/client-hints-infrastructure/
`https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/202#issuecomment-558294095` (Position of the firefox team on this standard)
1 Like
Hi,