Google wants to reduce the large amount of information browsers typically pack into the “User-Agent” header lines they send out, but this has been delayed for now <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/20/google_useragent_string_revision/>. This makes sense. Sites should not be changing their behaviour based on how browsers identify themselves, but on what functionality they actually support. But I wonder what this will mean for sites that routinely block the default user agents for scripting tools like wget and Python’s urllib ... But who is objecting to Google’s plan? Advertisers, who are apparently relying on user-agent checks as an important part of their mechanism for detecting ad fraud. Which is quite an incredible admission, really.