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miketaylr / user-agent-reduction

This repository is for documenting and discussing all matters related to User Agent Reduction in Chromium.
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Bots related information #7

Closed runesam closed 2 years ago

runesam commented 2 years ago

The UA reduction is aiming to reduce the information available on the UA to be only about the following:

  1. The browser's brand (name).
  2. The browser’s significant version.
  3. A desktop or mobile distinction. E.g having either mobile or desktop keywords in the user agent string.
  4. The platform the browser is running on. (By definition A platform consists of an operating system, and the hardware).

Given the following examples of a user agent of a bot coming from Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Mobile Safari/537.36
- AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) 
+ (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36
- AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
+ Google-PageRenderer Google (+https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/)

#f03c15 refers to the software or the library that hosts the browser, also a contact/referrer to the developer/author of that software/library. #c5f015 refers to the rendering and the layout engine.

as the reduction going to be applied, eventually. I can't rectify whether this information will be available either in the frozen UA string or any of the new UAH.

could someone help clarify this?

abeyad commented 2 years ago

Hi Sam - the Googlebot string won't be coming from Chrome, so there's nothing there for us to reduce. That part of the UA string is constructed by Googlebot and sent in the User-Agent header when crawling the web.

runesam commented 2 years ago

Hi @abeyad thank you for the quick answer. I didn't know the Googlebot string won't be coming from Chrome, so with that being said, the bot related information shall remain available not affected by the proposal reduction.