Any plans to include ua-client-hints

[abrahamjuliot]

The ua-client-hints are currently in Chrome 84 and 85.

https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints#explainer-reducing-user-agent-granularity

Navigator.prototype.userAgentData
NavigatorUAData.prototype.getHighEntropyValues

await navigator.userAgentData.getHighEntropyValues(
  ["platform", "platformVersion", "architecture",  "model", "uaFullVersion"]
)
// returns
{
  architecture: "x86", 
  model: "", 
  platform: "Windows", 
  platformVersion: "10.0", 
  uaFullVersion: "85.0.4171.0"
}

[kdzwinel]

Thanks Abraham! That's a great idea and TBH I wasn't aware of the existence of JS API for CH. We should track it alongside the Accept-CH header. That being said, we are currently limited to tracking only APIs that are native to the browser and version of Chromium that this project is currently running (v78) doesn't yet have that API. Updating puppeteer won't help either as the latest officially supported Chromium version is v83 (https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer/releases).

We will add support for CH as soon as puppeteer supports Chromium 84. In the meantime though, researches interested in this data can get it by:

1. Collecting Accept-CH header by listing it in the saveHeaders param of the request collector.
2. Collecting JS APIs by adding them (Navigator.prototype.userAgentData and NavigatorUAData.prototype.getHighEntropyValues) to https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-radar-collector/blob/master/collectors/APICalls/breakpoints.js
3. Forcing crawler to use Chromium 84+ via https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-radar-collector/blob/master/crawler.js#L43 .

Please note thought that running Chromium that's not officially supported by puppeteer is not guaranteed to work.

[abrahamjuliot]

Just a quick update: as of Jun 26, due to site breakage, ua-client-hints are removed from 84 beta through 86 canary. Some versions of chromium currently still have it (Brave Nightly, etc.).

Due to site breakage, we decided to take a slow roll-out approach. Off-by-default would enable us to avoid incurring breakage on Enterprise users (who turn off Finch) as well as other embedders. @ 2264366