Doing browser detection the wrong way, probably dictated by Google marketing policy: any Chromium browser is supported by Google Docs - unless the user agent string contains the "Vivaldi" keyword.

"Issues" like this made the Vivaldi team remove their brand from their default user agent string long ago, effectively hiding the browser's market share in stats, as it will be counted as Google Chrome adding to Chrome's market share.

You reminded me about Vivaldi, haven't used it in years, I'm impressed with the progress tbh

yeah i have a user agent spoofer for that exact purpose, in case a website gets ideas.

Everything is allowed in love and web

UA header is bullshit anyway. It was only ever meant as a way for clients to introduce themselves, e.g. for debugging purposes. But of course people came up with countless "clever" hacks they could perform with that data, and of course those hacks broke as soon as a new version of a browser came out since no one had the time to maintain those hacks. And then browser developers decided to break it even further by mimicking the UA header to get around those broken hacks.

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Wtf does that even mean? Why does a single UA header include the name of every major browser out there?

IIRC the Mozilla/5 start should prevent triggering ancient browser hacks, like "Opera 10" might have matched "^Opera 1" (in the sense of Opera 1.0)

Google is working on a system that makes sure a browser is compliant. If it is not compliant it will refuse to work with the browser. I cannot remember what they called this fiasco.

I see a future where tech companies try to force usage in a way that people (non NPCs) will not accept. This will split the web eventually.

@usr--2ndry You're right, but that was a rhetorical question and the answer is obvious from the context. The point is that due to all those names being included in the UA header for the sake of backwards compatibility, the original information which was supposed to be contained in the UA header became obfuscated to the point where it no longer serves its true purpose. Therefore it would make hardly and difference if all the browsers just sent some generic UA header to satisfy legacy software, while providing the relevant info about the browser using some other method.

@Demolishun can't wait for a split tbh.

@thebiochemic social media is doing it already. I am even seeing people try to organize a separate economy.

Chromium is a new IE6.