I said decades ago that user agent strings being sent to websites was a stupid idea. Once again it's come back to bite people.
I blame MicroSloth for the current mess, of course. Had websites not sent different content to different browsers because of Internet Exploder and the MS attempt to embrace, extend, and extinguish, user agent strings would have been eliminated as the privacy problem they are decades ago.
This thread is not about a privacy problem. Any privacy issues with user agents strings are negligible.
This is a much better versioning system. It summarises to the end user what has changed since the last update: bug fix, new feature, or major upgrade
Google and Mozilla’s versioning is stupid as it has exacerbated the 3 digit issue and is not informative to the end user.
Exactly. Firefox is really on maybe version 8 or 9. I have no idea what Chrome would be, I don't use it because I don't trust Google.
Apple is just as screwed up. 10.4 should probably have been 11. 10.6 should probably have been 12 (broke PPC compatibility). 10.7 should probably have been 13 (because it was just a broken mess). 10.15 probably should have been 14 (broke 32-bit). 11 should probably have been 15 (because the UI became a broken mess). 12 should have been 15.1 (because it didn't really change anything). And I probably missed a few bits of brokenness there. Apple can't version either.
Perfectly fine, as it shows which sites have shoddy code. Let those sites fail, at least then it will be fixed. It's usually a sign that there is way more technical debt or other problems.
This is a much better versioning system. It summarises to the end user what has changed since the last update: bug fix, new feature, or major upgrade
Google and Mozilla’s versioning is stupid as it has exacerbated the 3 digit issue and is not informative to the end user.
Exactly. Firefox is really on maybe version 8 or 9. I have no idea what Chrome would be, I don't use it because I don't trust Google.
Apple is just as screwed up. 10.4 should probably have been 11. 10.6 should probably have been 12 (broke PPC compatibility). 10.7 should probably have been 13 (because it was just a broken mess). 10.15 probably should have been 14 (broke 32-bit). 11 should probably have been 15 (because the UI became a broken mess). 12 should have been 15.1 (because it didn't really change anything). And I probably missed a few bits of brokenness there. Apple can't version either.
Oh, that’s ridiculous. All the versioning standards are ridiculous. There will never be one that satisfy everyone’s interests and needs. It’s not up to you to say what’s important or not.
*sigh* Y2K all over again. We found and fixed SO MANY things leading up to that. Mostly silly shortcuts that programmers took. They cut corners and it came back to bite them. Same thing here. Why did they give a fixed digit space for version. The article even said they ran into this going from single to two digit version numbers. They should have taken care of it once and for all.
No, nobody "took shortcuts" leading up to the Y2K thing:
Through the 70's, 80's and most of the 90's storage, particularly hardrive storage (called "DASD"), was severely limited and VERY expensive.
Epoch was a viable option and wouldn't cost much more than what they did do. For example the Classic MacOS epoch (beginning in 1984) started with January 1, 1904 and ended February 6, 2040 (though you could only set it to December 31, 2019) and Unix stared with January 1 1970. The 386 (32-bit) came out in 1985. Anybody still using only two digits by the times 90s rolled around was taking lazy shortcuts.
In fact, the less known 2020 bug was thanks to one of the fixes to the Y2K issue - windowing and was entirely a software problem not a hardware one.
Epoch is an equally bad option. Classic Mac OS has already hit part of the problem, UNIX will hit it in 2038.
Classic Mac OS is in very little use to where its date limitations would be an actual problem. As for UNIX there is an easy solution - use a 64-bit date (which IIRC the current version of the MacOS uses). No current piece of software will even exist by the time 292 billion AD rolls around.
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