Why the next Chrome version will break websites

Key Takeaways

microsoft edge google chrome and firefox are approaching version 100 in their software this might actually break some of the websites such as yahoo t-mobile hbo go and many others bethesda and others the reason is due to a bug in checking the version of the browser let's jump into and discuss so this comes from forbes let's read this a little bit of a blurb and then we'll discuss a little bit more serious warning issued for millions of edge firefox and chrome users um written by gordon kelly google microsoft and mozilla have warned users of chrome edge and firefox that a unified update will be soon be made to all three browsers which could bring down some of the world's biggest website in a move which has echoed off the y2k bug if you're unfamiliar this is the 2000s bug right people used to use the date as double digits you know for the 90s but when we moved to 2000 we're flipping back to zero zero so nothing really broke back then i don't even remember i i just i barely entered university that day that year so uh but but surprisingly nothing much broke except apps that uses two digits here so this is very similar chrome edge and firefox will soon move to version number 100 and this will cause some of the biggest size to fail so they are very sure because they build up a temporary version and they bumped up the version 200 and they started visiting different websites to basically test the browser and yeah these are the websites that broke bethesda t-mobile hbo go and yahoo so for currently i i believe some of the other ones have been fixed the developers actually fixed the problem right but so why why is that so let's look at the problem here and then a little bit discuss more the problem most websites check the version number of your browser when you visit for security i would say not just security to be honest there are there are some features that the browser have and that i want to take advantage of so in my back end i can force you to fail if you don't or you're not using that particular version of the browser because i'm i i know that i don't know the the the the beacon api has been introduced in this version of chrome and i want to use it so if you don't have it i'm sorry i'm not going to let you or the for example uh the modular javascript the mjs files have been introduced in this particular version and i want users to use that particular chrome browser so this is this is basically it so what they are doing the bug is they're checking the first two digits right so if you're uh if you're version 100 the version will come up to be 10. so based on that you're gonna check only the first two digits and if that gives you 10 instead of 100 then you will fail right so how do you actually let's talk about how do you check the version of the browser so there are two methods right look at all these beautiful arrows oh my god forbes i'm not gonna even attempt to devtool your sites jesus all right so here's one way you can do a window dot user agent right and that gives you a huge you know this string that tells you oh this is me right this is the equivalent version of my what i'm browsing a chrome 98 0 right and a safari so this is always fascinating to me i need to read more about it maybe the front-end engineers here and the channel can can shed more lights i don't know why we re the user agent actually have all of them there might be a good reason but but you can actually get the versions from here so i'm using chrome 98 let's actually verify that chrome 984758 right about about chrome sounds like the same version right 102 102 baby so that that's one way so in once the page load locally in the client side you can have some javascript that kicks in and check the browser and fail with an alert message or just don't continue loading the site or just give up sending any more requests right the other approach is just uh stop it on its knees and the backing really so when you make a request the first request that you send there's something that we send here jesus look at this look at this oh my god i don't know if you watched my death tooling series but this is this is atrocious all right so uh let's see you probably won't see this from uh yeah you won't see that guy dang it you won't see it now you should probably see it yeah my my face still covers it let's do that right so now you see it right see when you send a request the first request or all of them really uh we add a header on the request headers here right which says hey this is the user agent that tries to connect and any client that connects supposed to fill this you know you can easily fake this you know from your app if you have like a python app you can literally say anything in the user agent and we're just getting over it already right so when you do that you can check on the back and that hey i really only want i don't know chrome this particular version and if nothing else i don't want anyone to uh to connect to me that will really if you do this in the back end right then your page you can just serve some other page unauthorized or version is incorrect but this is really not a good idea because that that means even google right when they try to uh to what they call the crowl your website then they won't be able to connect to you right because you're blocking them you're blocking them from connecting those so their user agent won't be chrome they're probably gonna be some some other headless app right so this is this is a problem right and i believe as as forbes says so why are all the browsers updating to version 100 at the same time i believe it's just to pressure the this big website to actually fix their code right so whether it's in the javascript or on the back and i really doubt it's on the back and to be honest right it's probably some javascript local code that executes says hey you have an old browser so just fixing that it's not going to be easy for those big companies because those this code is probably as we say in arabic which means it's been there forever you know and nobody know anything about it right so so getting there and trying to fix it people will get freaked out to just touch anything you know especially legacy code so yeah i think it's going to take a little bit while to to fix that and make sure nothing actually else break but then they have they have to fix it otherwise uh chrome uh firefox and others will will break and uh according to their website also they they mentioned that if they might actually delay the 100 release it's like okay let's freeze it on 99 or 99 let's add some patches and some minor bump up some minor versions but yeah yeah that's about it i thought this was an interesting news i wanted to talk about it catch you in the next one thank you so much stay awesome