Google has just recently launched Chrome 100. This can break websites that weren't written to handle 3 digit version numbers. It is also a problem for Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge as well.

Why is this happening? We all thought that after the Y2K problem we won't face another computer problem but now we have the version 100 problem. What exactly is the problem anyway? Would the internet go down because of this? Luckily not.

The problem crops up because some developers try to adapt their websites for a particular browser version so that they can server certain features to the visitors and would not show certain features if the browser version is older than that. In order to do this, they would get the version number through a short text description called the user agent string, but sometimes the scripts would just extract the last 2 digits of the 3 digit version number. So now you can imagine what would happen when the version is 100. Instead of version 100, they get version 00.

This will cause problems like the website not able to show up or not working properly or might just popup up telling you that your browser is out of date and asking you to upgrade. Some reported problems from sites like Mercedes-Benz, a license plate renewal tool in Ontario, Canada, IMB Bank in Australia, and India's Space Resource Organization.

Mozilla has already warned of similar problems for Firefox as it would be launching its version 100 this early May. If you are a web developer and you remembered that some of your previous projects or websites did use some browser version detection codes, it is better to make sure it won't run into this problem.