Version 100 of browsers can break websites

Version 100 of the major web browsers is coming and It could be a problem managing web pages. When the version number of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge reaches three digits, many sites They will not be able to handle the corresponding user agent strings.

Do you remember the effect of 2000? The potential “Millennium Error” caused enormous concern as it was feared that the computer systems that govern the entire planet might not correctly interpret the two-digit “00” date. There were concerns that ATMs would not work or planes would fall from the sky. Thankfully none of that happened, but now there is a similar (technically) problem for web browsers.

When web browsers moved from version 9 to version 10, there were similar issues. Some of you will remember the Y2K error. Other acquaintances were compatibility issues Microsoft had Windows 9 in development (which can be confused with Windows 95 or Windows 98) and thus ended up releasing the system as Windows 10. Or how Microsoft, internally, named the modern Windows 6x. (Windows 8.1 advertises itself as Windows 6.3 to avoid application compatibility issues.)

Browser version 100

When you try to access a web page like MuyComputeryour device sends a request to that page that includes User agent string. For example Firefox browser is «Firefox: Mozilla / 5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv: 96.0) Geco / 20100101 Firefox / 96.0». Web browsers use different formats for this, but due to the way user agent parsing libraries work, they can cause problems reading the three-digit version numbers. (If you want more technical information, Otsukari explains it well)

Developers from all providers have been testing the jump for the three-digit version for months. Mozilla started creating a file Experiment To see if the three-digit version numbers can cause problems I found it Part of the website is not loading or not working properly. Google works in a similar way, allowing developers to force the v100 user agent string for testing purposes.

Browser developers are still working and we assume that the big portals will load properly to avoid a crunch. But there will be a smaller number of them that fail. The short-term solution to avoid problems with version 100 of browsers is this major release Temporarily frozen in version 99, at least at the user agent token level. We will know soon. Chrome 100 should arrive in late March and Firefox 100 in early May.