[conspire] Google announces blocking logins from non-approved browsers

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

This probably affects more than KDE/Gnome-based browsers.

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/031604.html <https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/031604.html>

> Google says: "The browser must identify itself clearly in the 
> User-Agent. The browser must not try to impersonate another browser 
> like Chrome or Firefox." We cannot comply with this because user agent 
> spoofing is required for compatibility with various Google websites. I 
> am continually fighting to maintain our user agent quirks for Google 
> domains, see e.g. [1] or [2]. Even if we were to remove all user agent 
> quirks, it would still be impossible for Google to distinguish between 
> a desktop browser and an embedded browser framework, since the user 
> agent header is going to be the same: Epiphany doesn't even append 
> "Epiphany" anymore, in order to maximize the chances that websites will 
> treat us like Safari. Even if we did, there are many other WebKit-based 
> browsers that would be impacted (off the top of my head: eolie, surf, 
> etc.)

Yeah, until such time as websites actually just render shit and stop obsessing over UserAgent strings, this will be an issue. But now it’ll be more of one.

Deirdre
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