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Why is apple incorrectly reporting "catalina" for every OS version after Mojave?

Bigwaff

Bigwaff

Contributor
Sep 20, 2013
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rin67630 said:
Why is Apple incorrectly reporting "Catalina" for every OS version after Mojave?
Do they fear to report the real markert share of macOS versions?
Click to expand...
If you had followed the Webkit bug link conversation explaining why, you would have learned it is supposedly to help eliminate user tracking and identification by various web sites via fingerprinting.
 
rin67630

rin67630

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Apr 24, 2022
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Bigwaff said:
If you had followed the Webkit bug link conversation explaining why, you would have learned it is supposedly to help eliminate user tracking and identification by various web sites via fingerprinting.
Click to expand...
Weak attempt to hide the real motivations...
Security by obfuscation never was a good idea.
They know that @Apple too.
 
rin67630

rin67630

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chrfr said:
The WebKit and Mozilla developers are just closing one avenue of browser fingerprinting and it's a perfectly reasonable method to do so.
Click to expand...
It's not just the WebKit and Mozilla developers; Every browser does so:
"Safari (and all browsers) on my M1 MacBook running macOS Ventura still shows the useragent as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.4 Safari/605.1.15"
(last comment #13 of my reference)
"Fighting Fingerprinting" looks like a rogue attempt to give a justification to an imposed fact.
 
G

galad

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Apr 22, 2022
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Developers can't count, like Windows 10 is still reporting a different version number to apps (because 10 is less and 95 and 98, and some apps checked only the first number) macOS reported a different number too because many hard coded checks, and changing numbers break things.

Anyway, if you think you already have an answers, that's good, it's not something to die on.
 
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bad_robot

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Mar 13, 2019
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Seems like some kind of glitch or oversight on Apple's part. I doubt they're trying to hide the real market share; it's probably just a data reporting issue.
 
FreakinEurekan

FreakinEurekan

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Sep 8, 2011
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Back when macOS 11 came out, as I recall it did report "Mac OS X 11_0_0" and a bunch of websites freaked out and said Safari wasn't up to date or some-such. So they switched back to 10_15_7 and the problem went away.

I suspect the decision was just to leave it rather than break a kajillion websites again in the future.
 
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rin67630

rin67630

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FreakinEurekan said:
Back when macOS 11 came out, as I recall it did report "Mac OS X 11_0_0" and a bunch of websites freaked out and said Safari wasn't up to date or some-such. So they switched back to 10_15_7 and the problem went away.
Click to expand...
That did not "break" rogue websites not testing correctly, they broke themselves with a bad coding.
Correcting bugs through cheating is not sane.
 
Starfia

Starfia

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Apr 11, 2011
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rin67630 said:
Weak attempt to hide the real motivations...
Security by obfuscation never was a good idea.
Click to expand...

Data minimization is one of Apple's four main design tenets for privacy. (Why wouldn't it be a good idea?)

If you believe you know the real motivation, then a) by all means, please tell us with the support of argument or evidence, and b) why did you start a thread asking what the real motivation is?
 
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Slix

Slix

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Mar 24, 2010
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As others have said, this was due to many websites breaking, and Apple not wanting to mess with that, plus security/privacy from having all users report they are running the same OS. Personally, I'm ok with this change for the additional reason that it means that developers can't arbitrarily cut off support for a 4 year old OS on a Mac simply because they want to as easily. In theory, this means the web will stay more consistent across browsers, OSes, and computers for a lot longer than they were in recent years.
 
rin67630

rin67630

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Slix said:
that developers can't arbitrarily cut off support for a 4 year old OS on a Mac simply because they want to as easily.
Click to expand...
Really? Why would someone want to do something that stupid?
Web admins need compatibility with W3C rules, not operating systems, irrespective of which version.
 
Slix

Slix

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Mar 24, 2010
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rin67630 said:
Really? Why would someone want to do something that stupid?
Web admins need compatibility with W3C rules, not operating systems, irrespective of which version.
Click to expand...
I have no idea. As a website owner, I want as many users as possible to be able to access it, but not every website does that. A lot of them will tell you your browser is out of date even if the features would work just fine on an older version of macOS (like using the Nightly build of Firefox from 2020 on my old iMac - YouTube yells at you that it might be unsupported, but it works just fine). Tech moves fast, but a lot of websites would work just fine on much older browsers if the developers worked on making that possible. Obviously, we won't know the impact of this user agent change for a few more years probably, when Catalina is more out of circulation and those browsers stop getting updates.
 
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