Remove get_browser() from core

Den 2015-12-03 kl. 13:44, skrev Martin Keckeis:

2015-12-02 21:02 GMT+01:00 Andrea Faulds ajf@ajf.me:

Hi Martin,

Martin Keckeis wrote:

i think it's time to deprecate the function get_browser().

The reason is simple: Since the browscap.ini file has grown a lot this
function does need way too much time, see here for example

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12067641/get-browser-slowing-down-page-load-any-alternative

The underlying browscap.ini file is still a very resource to use and there are very good official packages out there to use it
https://packagist.org/packages/browscap/browscap-php

I also compared the browscap.ini file to other UserAgent parsers around and it looks still good
http://thadafinser.github.io/UserAgentParserComparison/results/index.html

I'd also support removing get_browser(), but for a different reason: it
encourages user agent sniffing, which is a bad practice that has led to the
mess that is modern User-Agent headers. The web is an open platform which
degrades gracefully, where you can detect if browsers support features you
need and adapt accordingly. Detecting specific browsers is harmful to
competition and not future-proof.

Thanks.

--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/

--

User agent sniffing was sadly missused to detect e.g. if it's a mobile
device and redirect to a mobile page -> which is wrong right.

But user agent sniffing is still a good information source for different
things:

• statistics / analytics
• cross selling
• ...

But that's not needed in a language core anyway :-)

Also good for cuctomer support. Knowing roughly which browser
users have is quite helpful for e.g. finding errors in web apps.

//Björn

2015-12-03 14:38 GMT+01:00 Pierre Joye pierre.php@gmail.com:

On 2 בדצמ׳ 2015, at 9:52, Martin Keckeis martin.keckeis1@gmail.com
wrote:

Hello together,

i think it's time to deprecate the function get_browser().

+1. Would be nice if we could point to a recommended alternative in the
deprecation message.

+1 too.
Hard to do it in the error message but there are plenty of tools doing a
far better jobs using log analysis (for the stats).

Cheers,
Pierre

A message would really be good.

But get_browser() is a bit special, since it returns the "browser
capabilities" which only this type of parser can do.
So the "dropin" replacement would be
https://github.com/browscap/browscap-php

I will soon publish a new check with >1000k user agents analyzed by 9
different parsers out there...will notice you if it's done.

Best regards
Martin