> On May 6, 2017, at 5:19 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanz...@igalia.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > You're probably aware that WebKitGTK+ has user agent quirks to make various > popular websites work, most notably google.com. For our list of quirks, see: > > https://trac.webkit.org/browser/webkit/trunk/Source/WebCore/platform/UserAgentQuirks.cpp > > Recently we had two major bugs caused by these quirks: > > https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171603 (New YouTube displays only > white page) > https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171770 (Google login fails on white > page) > > In the case of the YouTube bug, I decided to just remove the quirk. This case > was pretty much a nightmare scenario, because Google decided that a random > subset of users would receive the new version of YouTube long in advance of > the rest of us. This means that we had a portion of our users complaining > that YouTube was "broken" for weeks when we were unable to reproduce the > issue (and had no way to do so; how could we have guessed it was some trial > program?). > > Anyway, removing the quirk is not a good option for the generic google.com > quirk in the second bug. If we use a standard user agent, we receive a crap > unusable 1990s version of Google Calendar, a high source of user complaints, > and also the awesome 3D earth mode in Google Maps that our users expect is > unavailable. This makes users think that WebKit is bad. I found a solution, > but I know it's temporary; give it a few more months and Google will break us > again, no doubt. > > User agent is an extremely demotivating, never-ending game, and it's by far > our biggest web compatibility problem. It almost feels as if Google is > deliberately trying to break WebKit, which I know is not true as they don't > care either way about us... but they do know full well that basing logic off > of user agent checks serves to harm less-popular browsers, so it's hardly > unintentional. I cannot think of any aspect of WebKit development less > gratifying than maintaining our user agent quirk list, nor any bigger user > agent offender than Google. > > For a while I thought there was nothing we could do, but now I have an idea: > Safari could adopt the same (or lightly-adapted) user agent quirks that we > use for WebKitGTK+. Of course, only the small handful of websites to which we > currently need to send user agent quirks would be affected by this change: > Google, Yahoo, Slack, Whatsapp, Typekit, and some Chinese site Taobao. Now, > this would do no good for Safari, but it would be a huge help to us as it > would ensure that if these user agent offenders attempt to degrade > functionality for browsers not on their lists, they will have to at least > treat all WebKit browsers equally. Presumably they test to make sure their > websites work in Safari, so that should make this situation much better for > other ports. And if we run into problems, we at least know the change is > limited to this small set of websites. > > I think the existing quirks would be fine for Safari with minimal changes. We > would definitely need to add some #if OS(UNIX) && !PLATFORM(COCOA) guards > inside urlRequiresLinuxDesktopPlatform(), and put if !PLATFORM(IOS) around > the quirks that are designed to turn off mobile versions of websites. This > would only be a small amount of work to set up, and it would only affect the > handful of websites that we have identified as problematic. Would Apple be > willing to allow this? > > Alternatively, we could use the nuclear option and add a Chrome version > component, similar to how Chrome includes a Safari version in its user agent. > (Bonus: that will shut up Google's "switch to Chrome" ads for a couple weeks > until they figure it out.) Edge already includes a Chrome version. This would > undoubtedly be better for the web as a whole, but it would surely also > introduce serious short-term compatibility problems, as an unknown number of > websites would likely break horribly in Safari (and some known websites, e.g. > YouTube and Google Hangouts), so that's a pretty tough ask. Making it more > difficult for websites to send us crap versions of web pages would be good > for WebKit in the long term, but it's way safer to start only on quirks for > specific sites. > > What do you think? This is not my area of expertise, but why can't you just adopt Safari's user agent instead of the other way around?
- Saam > > Michael > > _______________________________________________ > webkit-dev mailing list > webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org > https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
