Google

The UK Competition and Markets Authority has received the first quarterly report from Google regarding its Privacy Sandbox proposals.

Here's what you need to know regarding the decision, including what actions you need to take to prepare.

In a surprise decision by Microsoft, Windows 11 does not have an associated User-Agent string and can only be detected with User-Agent Client Hints. It’s interesting that Microsoft has decided to implement an experimental feature that has yet to go through the Web standards process.

The User-Agent string has been part of the web for a long time, so it’s sad to see the plans to deprecate it next year. It’s important you prepare for User-Agent Client Hints, the proposed UA string replacement. With these five tools, you’ll be set for the industry change.

These HTTP header requests have been introduced within Chromium browsers to replace the User-Agent. While we don’t think this is a good idea, we need to upgrade our device detection capabilities to include support for this feature. This blog covers any questions you may have on User-Agent Client Hints support within our device detection.

Google’s plans to replace the User-Agent string with User Agent-Client Hints are not ideal, but we have to prepare our real-time data services accordingly. Version 4.3 of our API packages now includes support for User-Agent Client Hints.

This blog post provides some background concerning the change and explains to 51Degrees users both the lobbying efforts we support to reverse UACH and the modifications we will be making in Q2 2021

HTTP client hints are an experimental set of standards that enable a web server to ask a web browser to send additional HTTP header fields and values in subsequent requests. The development has been led by engineers from Google working on the Chromium web browser. This blog post gives an update on what's now happening with regards to client hints.

Chromium – the web browser stewarded by Google - have announced a plan to diminish the role of the HTTP User-Agent header in future versions of Chromium during 2020. While the engineering arguments for the change make some sense, the replacement solution – client hints – is far from proven, and details remain unclear. The proposal is yet to be agreed, and is just that, a proposal.

At 51Degrees we detected User-Agents for the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL over five months before the phones were publicly released, we first detected the development codename of the two devices, walleye and taimen, shortly followed by the formal moniker.