[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.