In March 2022, Chromium-based browsers will move from two-digit to three-digit app versions. Such a change might throw a wrench into the Internet and break compatibility on millions of websites. To prepare its browser for a major shift in version numbers, Google starts testing Chrome 100 UA or user-agent string.
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In case you don't know, the user-agent string is a set of data about your device sent by a browser to a website. A website analyzes received data and optimizes its content accordingly. For example, here is the user-agent string from Microsoft Edge:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/93.0.4577.82 Safari/537.36 Edg/93.0.961.52.
Several weeks ago, Mozilla started testing the same thing in Firefox, which is also slowly approaching version 100. If you want to help developers make sure the Internet stays intact once Chrome 100 is out (this potentially creates a big problem as more than 60% of Internet users prefer Chrome over other browsers), you can enable an experimental flag to replace the current UA with Chrome 100.
A post on bugs.chromium.com describes the flag:
To avoid any UA string breakage when Chrome ships v100, we should add a flag to chrome://flags which flips the current major version to 100 in the User-Agent string as well as navigator.userAgent.
Enable Chrome 100 User-Agent String in Google Chrome.
- Open Google Chrome, then paste the following link in the address bar:
chrome://flags/#force-major-version-to-100. - Select Enabled from the drop-down next to the flag name.
- Click the "Restart" button to relaunch the browser and apply the changes.
Once you enabled version 100 in User-Agent, use the Internet as you usually do. To restore the default settings (if you encounter troubles with loading websites), repeat the steps above and change the flag from "Enabled" to "Default." Those using Firefox can change their UA string using our dedicated article.
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