What a disgrace. People from Cloudflare have been trying to attract the open web community for years now, including posting on HN (hi, jgrahamc!), but they're interfering with a major part of the open web. Now all alternative browsers have to play the user agent faking game.
It has been always necessary to fake the user agent for browsers. Too many sites would complain otherwise.
25 years ago it was necessary to pretend to be MSIE. Then IceBrowser, a Java based browser, was doing that. But one of the customers for the company asked to provide a way to test for IceBrowser as the browser did not emulated MSIE properly in some cases so they wanted to provide a workaround. So a JavaScript-based test was provided. Then in couple of years a common JS library for browser detection had started to include that test and the test has to be disabled.
Then there was a story about Vivaldi browser from 5 years ago. Due to a bug in keyboard-only navigation there was an issue on google.com and apparently Google has implemented a workaround based on user-agent sniffing before the bug was fixed. Then, when Vivaldi fixed the issue, the fix broke google.com as Google was unaware that it should disable their workaround. That was the last straw forcing Vivaldi to fake the user agent by default.
At what point did anyone think cloudflare were the good guys? It’s a facade. They have shown multiple times over the years they are not ok the side of the users. They will try sweep things under the rug unless it ends up on HN or something.
