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by userbinator 2493 days ago
I always thought having a UA header in the HTTP spec was a bad idea, because it just encourages things like this.

Unfortunately, I've tried browsing with no UA header, and a surprisingly large number of sites --- even ones without any sort of "app functionality" --- will return strange errors.
2 comments
avian 2493 days ago
Because it's such a rare corner case. I've been running my blog for 10+ years and apparently I've never seen a request without the UA header - until a post got to the front page of HN a while back and someone like you caused a bunch of "Use of uninitialized value" errors in my logs. It's fixed now.
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amaccuish 2493 days ago
Actually that's a really good idea to move things towards checking compatibility with standards rather than by user agent. The hard job would be forcing these broken sites to fix themselves.

UPDATE: the idea below of Safari not updating it's UA seems to be a good way to move this forward.

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