MOmooreds·May 10, 2024Submission
Reducing User-Agent Granularity
2 points · Open discussionWICG
ua-client-hints
Bikeshed2019–2024
WICG / ua-client-hints
ua-client-hints
Wouldn't it be nice if `User-Agent` was a (set of) client hints?
8Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
621GitHub stars
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What it is
Wouldn't it be nice if `User-Agent` was a (set of) client hints?
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-12-13 02:38:04 UTC to 2024-05-10 02:56:03 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesI encourage you to review the decision making and engage in the discussion here: https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints
In Version 100 in Chrome and Firefox> https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints
I don't really understand how this will result in any real difference in privacy or homogeneity of the web. Realistically every browser that implements this is gonna offer up all the info the server asks for because asking the user each time is terrible UX.
Additionally this will allow google to further segment out any browser that doesn't implement this because they'll ask for it, get `null` back and respond with sorry we don't support your browser, only now you can't just change your UAS and keep going, now you actually need to change your browser.
And if other browsers do decide to implement it, they'll just lie and claim to be chrome to make sure sites give the best exp... so we're back to where we started.
In Chrome phasing out support for User-AgentThere not phasing out User-Agent strings entirely, they're actually upgrading them:
https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints
It looks like there's more fine grained control in the new version.
In Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent> With this new standard, just ask the user agent to include all details in its Accept-CH header.
That becomes an explicit choice by the site to request more information, it's up to the client/browser how it responds to that. Fewer bits of information are exposed by default.
> JS won't have access to it anymore - TFA wants to deprecate navigator.userAgent, so only the webserver would have access to user agent details? Why?
I should have linked to the top-level repo with the explainer (https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints) as it's not immediately clear from the spec, but access to the hint values is provided via getUserAgent()
In Blink-Dev – Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent stringExplainer: Reducing User-Agent Granularity
12 points · Open discussionFrom the article, there is this recent proposal for "UA-hints": https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints
In User Agent Changes