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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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