Version 100 of Firefox and Chrome may affect some websites

Chrome is currently at version 98, and Firefox is at version 97, both approaching the triple-digit mark. While the release of version 100 is a milestone to celebrate, depending on how the site is programmed, it can also lead to unexpected crises. Simply put, when a website wants to provide the most suitable browsing experience according to your browser version, it will read a string of text provided by the browser through http, called User Agent. This string itself has a very complicated history, but the key here is that if the website analyzes the User Agent incorrectly, it may only read two digits of the three-digit version number, resulting in various kind of question.

Mozilla launched an experiment last year to see how many sites would be affected, and recently released the results. The total number of affected sites is small, but there are some big ones, including HBO Go, Bethesda, and Yahoo. Possible errors include “Browser Not Supported” error messages, page rendering errors, data reading errors, 403 (Forbidden) errors, etc.

In order to solve this small crisis, the current plan of Chrome and Mozilla is to attract the attention of developers, and ask developers to use the User Agent with the three-digit version number to test to see if the website can work normally. If there is a major website problem that cannot be solved before version 100 comes out, both browsers will temporarily lock the major version number to 99, or temporarily “camouflage” the User Agent when the browser encounters a website that cannot be displayed correctly. Into the 99 version to respond.

Among the two browsers, according to the current progress, Chrome will first come to version 100, which is expected to be launched on March 29, while Firefox 100 is a little later and is expected to be launched on May 3. I can only hope that, like Y2K, developers can use the limited time to patch potential vulnerabilities, so that the two major browsers can smoothly jump.