Mozilla warns Firefox and Chrome 100th versions could make the Y2K nightmare repeat

Both Google and Mozilla are approaching version 100 for their browsers Chrome and Firefox, and the two browser developers say version 100 may affect some websites.

Google Chrome is expected to officially release version 100 on March 29, 2022, before that, they have launched version 100 for the Chrome Canary test browser. Firefox 100 is scheduled to launch on May 3, 2022.

Mozilla and Google have both started testing to see if version 100 will have any effect, and it looks like a sizable number of sites are experiencing issues.

Basically, when you visit a website, the browser identifier string (User Agent string) is sent with the web page request. When the browser version has three digits, it can cause some problems.

“When browsers first went to version 10 more than 12 years ago, many problems were discovered with the UA parser library because the version number went from one digit to two,” the developer team said. Mozilla developer explains. Just like the infamous Y2K bug that rendered many computers indistinguishable from 2000 to 1900, each browser has different formats for UA strings.

“Some UA analysis libraries may be buggy or hard-coded to not take into account the three-digit version number,” Mozilla said.

Both browsers will continue to test before releasing the 100 Stable version (stable for all users), but it seems that both Mozilla and Google have plans to freeze UA at version 99 to prevent trouble. We’ll have to wait and see if this becomes a big deal when version 100 of the browsers is released.

Reference: Howtogeek