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List:       webkit-dev
Subject:    Re: [webkit-dev] Position on User-Agent Client Hints
From:       Maciej Stachowiak <mjs () apple ! com>
Date:       2020-05-08 7:14:23
Message-ID: 475B7789-97BE-4EBB-B74B-93E23F314E0F () apple ! com
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Accidentally removed Yoav from Cc and I'm not sure if he is on this list.

> On May 8, 2020, at 12:04 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I would consider myself mildly positive as to the direction, but that's my personal \
> view for the moment, absent consultation with my colleagues. I will solicit more \
> viewpoints. 
> I particularly appreciate the responsiveness to feedback and that Yoav in \
> particular has been willing to iterate. 
> I think there's a number of things in the spec that should be cleaned up before an \
> implementation ships enabled by default, specifically around interop, privacy, and \
> protection against UA lockouts. I know there are PRs in flight for some of these \
> issues. I think it would be good to get more of the open issues to resolution \
> before actually shipping this. 
> Regards,
> Maciej
> 
> > On May 7, 2020, at 4:22 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro@gnome.org> wrote:
> > 
> > My personal $0.02: I'm mildly supportive of this spec. It's certainly an \
> > improvement on existing HTTP user agent headers. I appreciate that you worked to \
> > incorporate feedback into the spec and considered the concerns of small browsers. \
> >  Is it going to solve all the problems caused by user agent headers? No. If \
> > WebKit implements the spec, we're surely going to eventually need a quirks list \
> > for user agent client hints to decide which websites to lie to, just like we \
> > already have quirks for the user agent header. And as long as Chrome sends a user \
> > agent header that includes the string "Chrome", it's unlikely we'll be able to \
> > get rid of the existing quirks list. But I think client hints will probably \
> > reduce the amount of websites that *accidentally* break WebKit, by replacing wild \
> > west UA header parsing with well-defined APIs, and adding some GREASE for good \
> > measure. The promise of freezing Chrome's UA header sounds nice, as it makes \
> > quirks easier to maintain. And being able to ration entropy by revealing details \
> > about the platform on an active rather than passive basis is quite appealing. 
> > The spec attracted some misplaced concern about negative impact to small \
> > browsers, which I've rebutted in [1]. I'm not quite so enthusiastic about this \
> > spec as I was initially, especially after I was convinced that the GREASE is \
> > never going to be enough to remove our quirks list, but it's certainly not going \
> > to *hurt* small browsers. 
> > This spec has received some pretty harsh criticism from the user tracking \
> > industry (some call it the "ad industry"). Not historically a friend of WebKit, \
> > so sounds good to me. ;) 
> > One concern I haven't mentioned elsewhere is that frozen UA header might \
> > encourage deeper levels of fingerprinting than are currently used, e.g. for ad \
> > fraud prevention. caddy has started blocking WebKitGTK users based on TLS \
> > handshake fingerprint (yes, really!) [1]. If techniques like that take off as a \
> > result of this, that could potentially backfire on us quite badly. But websites \
> > could choose to do such things today anyway, client hints or no, and if so, the \
> > solution will be for us to just try even harder to look more like Chrome. 
> > Seems like a net positive overall. I don't work for Apple and can't say whether \
> > it might be implemented by WebKit. 
> > Michael
> > 
> > [1] https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/467#issuecomment-583104002
> > [2] https://mitm.watch/
> > 
> > 
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> > webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org
> > https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
> 
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