The two most popular browsers on the internet are reaching a milestone. Chrome and Firefox have both reached 100 million active users, potentially breaking websites that weren’t designed to work with older versions of the browsers. This milestone was first reached in September of 2017, and since then both browsers have continued to grow. Chrome has seen the biggest growth, with Firefox coming in second. This growth is likely due to the popularity of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox as web browsers. This milestone could have a negative impact on websites that aren’t updated to work with newer versions of the browsers. Websites that are not updated may not be able to display properly or even load at all on these newer versions of the browsers. ..
According to both Google and Mozilla, Firefox and Chrome are rapidly approaching version 100, which the browser makers say could break some websites. Sometimes, cranking it to 100 can do damage.
Google Chrome is scheduled to reach version 100 on March 29, 2022, which is right around the corner. Firefox has a little more time, as it’ll reach version 100 on May 3, 2022.
Mozilla and Google (via Bleeping Computer) both started testing whether version 100 would cause issues, and it does appear that some pretty major websites are having problems.
Basically, when you visit a website the browser’s user-agent is sent along with the request for a web page. When the browser sends a version number with three digits, it could cause all sorts of issues.
“Without a single specification to follow, different browsers have different formats for the User-Agent string, and site-specific User-Agent parsing. It’s possible that some parsing libraries may have hard-coded assumptions or bugs that don’t take into account three-digit major version numbers,” said Mozilla in a blog post.
Both browsers will continue to experiment ahead of the release of version 100, but it seems both Mozilla and Google have plans in place to freeze the user-agent at version 99 to prevent issues. We’ll have to wait and see if this ends up being a big deal when version 100 of each browser releases, but it’s definitely something worth keeping an eye on.
