Google Chrome 100 Trips Up Websites That Can't Count High Enough
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- 01 Apr 2022
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Google on Tuesday released Chrome 100, an iteration of the dominant browser that can trip up websites that weren't written to handle three-digit version numbers. It's a problem that, though rare, also affects people using Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
The problem crops up because developers sometimes try to adapt their websites for particular browser versions, for example by removing features that won't work on older releases. Browsers share their version number through a short text description called the user agent string, but website scripts sometimes extract just two of the three digits in the version number.
Problems can include websites not working at all or showing a popup erroneously saying your browser is out of date. Problems using Chrome, Firefox and Edge have been reported at sites including Mercedes-Benz, a license plate renewal tool in Ontario, Canada, IMB Bank in Australia and India's Space Resource Organization. Some sites built with the Duda website creation tool also showed problems, according to Chrome's bug tracker. Although Duda fixed the issue before Chrome 100 shipped, several other sites are still affected.
Software that breaks as time passes is nothing unusual. Programmers make mistakes, software foundations like iOS and Windows change every year, engineers update internet communication standards and online services change their programming interfaces. With billions of Chrome users, though, this ticking of the Chrome version update clock is a widespread issue across the globe.
The browser version number problem resembles the Y2K problem 22 years ago, when software that recorded only the last two digits of the year was thrown off when 1999 became 2000. A similar problem is coming in 2038 when a 32-bit number that some computers use to count the seconds from Jan. 1, 1970, is no longer large enough.
Mozilla has warned of similar problems for Firefox, due to reach version 100 on May 5. Firefox includes a list of "interventions" that can fix problems like the version number issue with specific websites. Microsoft Edge, now based on Google's open-source Chromium browser foundation, also can have problems. Read More…
