After the year 2000 bug, version 100 bug? Chrome and Firefox are preparing for this anyway.
Do you remember the late 1990s, when everyone was afraid of the arrival of the year 2000, synonymous with many errors in our computers due to the change of the year? It looks like we’ll be running into something very similar today, albeit on a smaller scale, as it will be limited to only two web browsers, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
After the year 2000 bug, version 100 bug?
Indeed, Chrome and Firefox, the two mainstream browsers today, are approaching version 100. And because of this, moving to that famous version 100 could affect how websites identify browsers.
According to a post on the Mozilla website, “Major release 100 is a major milestone for both Chrome and Firefox. It can also cause problems on sites when changing from a two-digit to a three-digit version number.”
Chrome and Firefox are getting ready for it anyway
The post also added: “Without any particular specification, different browsers have different formats for the User-Agent string and for a particular site to parse that User-Agent. It’s possible that some parsing libraries make the assumption of a hard-coded version number length [i.e. 2, editor’s note] or that they have bugs that don’t account for three-digit version numbers.”
The good news is that both Google and Mozilla are now working on a solution to this problem. One of the options used today is to make sites believe that the current version is version 100 in order to identify the problems caused and fix them. The two giants have also already planned to freeze major releases at level 99 until a permanent fix is in place.