Blink: Intent to Deprecate + Freeze `navigator.userAgent`

[georgestephanis]

​https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink-dev/-2JIRNMWJ7s/yHe4tQNLCgAJ

It seems there's intent to freeze the navigator.userAgent functionality from the blink dev team, in favor of the User-Agent Client Hints functionality as documented here: ​https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/

Starting an issue here to discuss what (if anything) we'll need to do to handle how WordPress parses and works with user agent strings.

subsequent hn discussion thread: ​https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044057

[ehtis]

Client Hints can be tested in Chrome 84 beta.

Also, re. the traditional User-Agent string format:

First, the phase of the project that reduces the amount of available information in the traditional User-Agent string to browser (e.g. “Chrome”), major browser version, and mobile/desktop, has been deferred until at least 2021 to provide additional time for the ecosystem to evaluate the new UA-CH capabilities.

​Source

[adamsilverstein]

Thanks for opening this ticket @georgestephanis - I agree we should be paying attention to this, and may eventually need to update all use in core of navigator.userAgent.

For now, it seems like most core use will continue to work even with the reduced userAgent information discussed at the bottom of the ticket thread, because we only look for the browser name in nearly all cases: ​https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/search?p=3&q=navigator.userAgent