Comment by 3xblah

6 years ago

The Google employee argues that through UA-CH Google wants to disincetivise "allow" and "block" lists.

After many years of testing HTTP headers, IMO this really is a non-issue. Most websites return text/html just fine without sending any UA header at all.

What is an issue are the various ways websites try to coax users to download, install and use a certain browser.

Another related issue with Google Chrome is users getting better integration and performance when using Chrome with Google websites than they would if they used other clients. ^1 Some make the analogy to Microsoft where it was common for Microsoft software to integrate and perform better on Microsoft Windows whereas third party software was noticably worse to integrate and perform on that OS.

This leads to less user agent diversity. Users will choose what works best.

UA diversity is really a more important goal than privacy, or privacy in Chrome. The biggest privacy gains are not going to come from begging Google to make changes to Chrome. They could however come from making it easier for users to switch away from using Chrome and to use other clients. That requires some cooperation from websites as well as Google.

Those other clients could theoretically be written by anyone, not just large companies and organisations that are dependent on the online ad sales business. It would be relatively easy to achieve "privacy-by-design" in such clients. There is no rule that says users have to use a single UA to access every website. There needs to be choice.

For example, HN is a relatively simple website that does not require a large, complex browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc. to read. It generates a considerable amount of traffic and stands as proof that simpler websites can be popular. Varying the UA header does not result in drastic differences in the text/html returned by the server.