Released in 2008, Chrome will reach its 100th version early next year, but unfortunately this milestone will cause some websites to no longer work in Google’s browser. While there aren’t any major changes or revolutionary new features planned for Chrome 100, the search giant knows this major release will likely cause problems for older websites.
Although Chrome 100 will be released in March next year, Google has already begun to warn users and site owners about potential problems. The warning is as follows:
“In the first half of 2022 Chrome will reach a three-digit major version number: 100! Years ago, when it first hit version 10, many issues were discovered with the User-Agent parsing libraries as the major version number went from one digit to two. We are now approaching Chrome 100. Three-digit version We want to detect potential issues with the number early on.”
Websites developed with the Duda web design kit will no longer display properly when Chrome’s major version number goes from two digits to three. Fortunately, Google has a plan to keep the web intact, and the company has already started contacting the developers to warn them.
In order for a website to know which browser and version you are using, the site checks the User-Agent string, which is essentially a line of text that your browser adds to every web link it makes.
This string, for example: “Mozilla/5. 0 (Windows NT 10. 0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537. 36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96. 0. 4664. 110 Safari/537. 36”
From this we understand that the user is using version 96 of Chrome. The problem here is that the first two digits are usually read and the pages of the site are displayed accordingly. When the version number is 100, systems will see it as 10, not 100, and this can cause display problems.
While the move to version 100 has the potential to break many legacy sites, Google and Mozilla are working hard to address this issue before the rollout of version 100 of both Chrome and Firefox next year.