789
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Magnolia_@lemmy.ca to c/linux@lemmy.ml

It peaked at 4.05% in March. The last 2 months it went just below 4% as the Unknown category increased. For June the reverse happened, so 4.04% seems to be the real current share of Linux on Desktop as desktop clients were read properly/werent spoofed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Shit started hitting the fan when everyone started faking Netscape's "Mozilla" user agent. Then "KHTML, like Gecko" and after that every fork kept the originating name in the string and extended it.

[-] dan@upvote.au 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There's a good explanation about that here: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The issue is that a lot of sites used the user-agent to determine if the browser supported particular features (e.g. show a fancy version of a site if the user is using Netscape, otherwise show a basic version for Mosaic, lynx, etc). New browsers had to pretend to be the old good browsers to get the good versions of sites

This is why getting rid of the user agent is a good thing. Sniffing the UA is a mess.

this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
789 points (98.8% liked)

Linux

48021 readers
972 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS