[HunOL]

> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.

Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat

[immibis]

Even market-dominant companies do this. Windows ships a bunch of backward compatibility patches. Graphics card drivers (especially Nvidia) wholesale replace shaders in popular games.

[darknavi]

Webkit does this.

Examples:

- https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

- https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pl...

[immibis]

> DuckDuckGo discriminates against WebKitGTK's standard user agent by returning an HTTP 400 Bad Request error when loading every search result.

I guess they only want spyware browsers on DDG.

[int_19h]

Thing is, Opera had to do this specifically to work around stuff like UA-based degradation of service on YouTube etc.

[doctor_radium]

Somehow I wasn't previously familiar with about:compat, which led me down a rabbit hole to finding about:about. Great stuff!