Referer is not quite the same as how it was. In recent years, the default behavior in most cases is for the browser to either send just the origin, or no referer at all.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

"Origin" means no path, so the referer might tell me which search engine the user used, but not what search query was done. It's much better than in the old days, where I might even see someone's session ID in the referer.

That header and Referer were always a mistake. I don't think The Google's motivation is pure, but I agree in principle.

A lot of sites will break for people as a result, though. Maybe that's what The Google wants, though.

My web development knowledge is very limited. But isn't this the main method where simple websites (most static generators) used to decide if the user is browsing from a mobile or not and serve a version based on that?

I would appreciate it if someone explain what other things people do to tackle this, or if I'm completely wrong?

I agree that user agent is not the best idea but it helps endlessly when you need to find out what browser a non techy person is using - just ask them to go to one of the endless sites that tells you what browser you're using based on the user agent string.

Without Referer how will jwz dot org troll HN users?!

No, because approximately nobody would customize it.

They could also use the user agent: "", or omit the http header entirely.

You can already do that with extension, can't you?

Yup. It's none of their business. They can't discriminate against us if they don't know anything about us.

I don't think web developers should be able to detect stuff like that either. Their ability to detect stuff provides identifying bits for fingerprinting. As far as I'm concerned, all the browsers should normalize the return values of those typeofs and all related functions so that Javascript can figure out exactly zero bits of information about the environment it's running on. Just like browsers will lie to Javascript when it tries to figure out your browsing history by checking the color of links.

The web platform gave web developers way too much freedom and they're abusing it. God giveth and god taketh away.

It doesn't matter. Actually those plugins are straight up counterproductive.

The best user agent is the one that offers them the fewest identifying bits. In other words, the user agent of the most popular version of Chrome. The ability to set it to "anything we want" is actually a trap. What we really want is for everyone to use the exact same user agent so they can't tell us apart.

If everyone has the same user agent, it's nothing but a waste of bandwidth and it should be removed. Google is actually achieving our objective here.