Required for showing the right resolution images. The alternative is blurry images or wasted bandwidth.
> time zone
Most people expect to see times in their local time.
> device model
This could probably be removed but can be useful for showing the right download button. Also I'm not sure this is explicitly shared? I'm curious what exactly they mean here.
Some mobile devices (especially cheap Androids) often have device model numbers and build version in the User-Agent headers. A few examples from a quick look at my access log:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 15; zh-CN; V2301A Build/AP3A.240905.015.A2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/123.0.6312.80 Quark/7.13.1.851 Mobile Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 13; STYLO RAIN Build/TP1A.220624.014) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.7151.89 Mobile Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14; moto g04 Build/ULA34.89-193; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/137.0.7151.89 Mobile Safari/537.36
All of these contain both the device/model name and specific software version.
This is only an issue on Android and some other devices really (e.g. "smart" TVs and whatnot); I'm not aware of any desktop browser that does that. Not all Android devices do either.
This is a major reason why I stopped storing User-Agent headers in the database for my analytics app. I originally assumed there would be a relatively limited set of headers, but at some point I had millions of unique ones. Now it just stores the extracted information (e.g. "Chrome 137 on Android 14"). It's a pretty silly situation and completely unnecessary, but it is what it is.
> Required for showing the right resolution images.
How many websites is this actually an issue for? I know web developers get all impressed with themselves about putting fancy images on their web pages, but the vast majority of them are simply useless decoration.
> Most people expect to see times in their local time.
So have a built-in widget in the browser that takes a time in UTC from the server and converts it to local time (if the user has that setting enabled in their browser settings) based on the computer's time zone.
Even client side Javascript could do this without having to tell the server anything about the client's time zone.
> can be useful for showing the right download button
How about just letting the user select the right download button?
Required for showing the right resolution images. The alternative is blurry images or wasted bandwidth.
> time zone
Most people expect to see times in their local time.
> device model
This could probably be removed but can be useful for showing the right download button. Also I'm not sure this is explicitly shared? I'm curious what exactly they mean here.