[Karunamon]

You don't have to invent imaginary scenarios when the one before us does quite well on its own. We are not talking about an individual, we are talking about a faceless megacorp with a storied history of bad faith.

Just being a faceless megacorp is reasonable grounds for losing the benefit of the doubt, but one with their history? Ascribing anything other than malice first is plain and simple naïveté.

[13of40]

I'm struggling to see the world from your point of view. Do you honestly believe there's a room full of cigar smoking robber barons somewhere in Redmond who got together and told the devops guy who runs that site to break compatibility with some niche browser's interim builds, because that's the best way to maximize profits? (And somehow these same guys were the ones pulling the strings in 1995?)

[MereInterest]

Align all the incentives, and you don’t need to have an explicit command. If your product demo is only tested on the company’s browser, no order is necessary to break compatibility, as it will drift away by default. If a team is chastised for having misrendered prototypes, but not for browser compatibility, then it makes sense for an individual to throw in a User Agent check.

It isn’t likely that any one individual is pushing for incompatibility, but that nobody cares about incompatibility. That lack of care about any standards, with “it works” and “it works on our browser/OS/hardware/etc” treated as synonymous, can be part of a company culture.