The Chrome browser launched in 2008 will usher in an update of version number 100 at the beginning of next year, but this landmark update will cause some websites to fail to run in Google’s browser.
Chrome 100 has no major changes or revolutionary new features, but Google has realized that this major version may cause problems with old websites. Chrome 100 will be released in March next year, and Google has already started warning users and site owners of potential problems in a blog post published in November.
Google said: “In the first half of 2022, Chrome will reach a three-digit version number: 100! Many years ago, when the browser first reached a two-digit version number, many problems were found in the user agent parsing library.
Now, our Chrome and Firefox are close to version 100, and Edge is not far away. We hope to discover possible problems related to the three-digit version number as soon as possible so that we can be prepared when it becomes a reality.
When the main version number of Chrome changes from two digits to three digits, websites developed with the web design toolkit Duda will no longer display correctly. Fortunately, Google already has a plan, and the company has begun contacting individual developers to warn them of upcoming changes.
In order to let the website know what browser the user is currently using and what version of the browser, the website will check the user agent string, which is a line of text that the browser appends to each network connection.
The following is an example of a user agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.110 Safari/537.36. At the end, you can see Chrome/96.0.4664.110, which means that the Chrome 96 version is running.
The problem with Duda is that its developers chose to read only the first two digits, so Chrome/96 would be 96, and Chrome/100 would be treated as 10. Not only that, Duda will automatically block any Chrome browser with a version lower than 40. For this reason, Chrome 100 will be regarded as Chrome 10 and will be automatically blocked by the web design toolkit, making it impossible to display websites created with it.
Although Google has considered forcing the major version number to be placed in the position of the minor version, and keep it at 99, so that Chrome/100 will be changed to Chrome/99.100, but this is just a backup plan. Instead, Google has started to contact individual developers to let them know about this issue before Chrome 100 is released. Google also added a new logo (#force-major-version-to-100) to the Chrome browser, which developers can use to check whether their website will be affected.
IT Home understands that although migrating to version 100 may destroy many old websites, Google and Mozilla are working hard to solve this problem before the launch of version 100 of Chrome and Firefox next year.