[stevage]

Whoa, that's weird. So once there is `!important`, the order of precedence flips? I'm sure there was a good reason for that...

[Macha]

Your OS had a dark theme, that gets represented in the browser as a not !important user style. The website should be able to override this to avoid the white text on white background problem.

But then if the user is tweaking a specific site, the user should be able to override anything with ! important if they really mean it.

[stevage]

Yeah, I understand that in general.

But what's curious is that normally it goes browser < user < author, but with !important, it flips so that browser > user > author. Specifically the part where the browser now outranks the user style is interesting.

[myfonj]

These are (presumably) for things that even user styles are not supposed to be able to "break". Sifting through https://meiert.com/en/blog/user-agent-style-sheets/ shows quite reasonable things such as

    @media (scripting) {
      noscript {
        display: none !important;
      }
    }

    optgroup {
      float: none !important;
      position: static !important;
      white-space: nowrap !important;
      word-wrap: normal !important;
    }

in the Firefox UA styles (though I'd permit overriding the former and I'd expect shadow DOM to handle the latter), or

    input[type="password" i] {
        -webkit-text-security: disc !important;
    }

in the Chrome UA style.

[matheusmoreira]

I believe the reason is to allow users to override websites.