[gizmo385]

Because when management asks you why their site that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doesn't work on <insert major browser here>, your answer can't be "the browser's implementation of the spec is shitty, blame them." Your answer is going to be, "Yeah, sure, let me fix that."

[chriswarbo]

> your answer can't be "the browser's implementation of the spec is shitty, blame them."

If it's a major browser which management cares about, then you should be testing with it already. If you're not, then logging user agent strings isn't going to help.

Logging user agent strings would help if, for example, an unexpectely-large proportion of users are using a "non-major" browser, in which your site is broken.

If the proportion is small, management won't care.

If the proportion is expected, then market/demographic research is partly to blame; update the spec.

If the browser is "major", you should be testing with it anyway.

If the site isn't broken, there's no problem.

[deecewan]

I see what you're saying, but unfortunately, especially in enterprise, the browser version is often locked to something quite old. One of our clients has locked to Chrome 48.

Even if Chrome followed the spec to a T, programmers still write bugs. So, I'm not going to expect a browser (at least) 15 versions old to behave perfectly. And we all know that the spec isn't perfectly implemented.

So, no. Unfortunately sometimes there are things that will make management care a lot about a browser that they really shouldn't.

[chriswarbo]

> Unfortunately sometimes there are things that will make management care a lot about a browser that they really shouldn't.

I never said management should or shouldn't care about this or that browser. I never said anything about browsers being new or old.

I said that developers should be testing with whatever browsers management cares about. If management care about it, and there's some justification, then add it to the spec.

> unfortunately, especially in enterprise, the browser version is often locked to something quite old. One of our clients has locked to Chrome 48.

That's an excellent justification for having Chrome 48 compatibility as part of the spec, so you should already be testing your sites with it. What has that got to do with user agent strings?

Is Chrome 48 even old? I tend to ensure IE6 compatibility, unless I have a good reason otherwise (e.g. voice calls over WebRTC, or something). When I'm using w3m, e.g. to read documentation inside Emacs, I occasionally play around with my sites to ensure they still degrade gracefully.

[CaptSpify]

Well, your answer should be: I'll reimpliment it using known, simple, stable technologies. But for some reason our industry hates those things.

[seandougall]

So... not the web, then? :-P

[nitrogen]

Management is not some all-powerful, all-knowing spectre impervious to persuasion. Don't give up so easily.

[matte_black]

Don’t forget “Also, it’s going to cost $X more.”