> A better question is why it was never fixed / renamed to proper names.
Because the reason it is the way it is in the first place is compatibility with sites that are doing things objectively wrong already, which makes it really hard to get them to change.
The problem is that poorly designed systems limit access or disable features based on a user-agent allowlist, which is never the right answer. There is no right way to do it because it's always wrong, but people choose to do it anyways.
I'm personally a fan of treating broken sites as broken, but I understand that realistically any "alternative" browser has to deal with all the broken sites designed for whatever came before it because otherwise most normal users won't consider switching.
If I were made King of the Internet for a day and able to enforce any changes I wanted on everyone, all the major browsers would have to change their user-agent string to something totally unique on the same day, intentionally breaking any sites that are doing it wrong for everyone so the broken sites are forced to fix their own nonsense. That'd come maybe two or three decrees down the line from "All ISPs are required to provide a globally routable IPv6 block in accordance with RFC 6177, providing only CGN IPv4 is a capital offense".
Personally I’d get rid of the user agent entirely. Stop sending it and let sites query available features rather than check the specific browser version.
There are valid reasons to want to know the specific user agent when working around bugs in old but popular versions, that's why I said a user-agent allowlist for access or advanced functionality was bad. That inevitably breaks any new platforms that haven't been explicitly approved, which is obviously bad. Denying access from or specifically only applying fixes to known bad versions is fine.
Also IMO it's useful as an admin to know what clients your users are using, but I do understand why many would prefer to limit the data shared with the sites you visit.
The abuse of the user agent for tracking and unreasonably blocking browsers - Chrome only websites that work fine when you spoof the user agent - out weighs the usefulness of being able to work around browser specific bugs.
These days old browser versions are for most companies, a problem of the past. IE is well and truly dead, and almost all users have auto updating browsers now.
Websites shouldn't really attempt to fit themselves to the browser, just detect which features are available and if there is some odd browser bug, wait until it's patched if it's affecting a major browser.
When my site says Best viewed in Netscape, I mean Netscape Navigator. The rest of the world may have moved on, but static HTML 3.2 with the blink tag is forever.
Proving my point, user agent allow lists would make it only ever work on Netscape, when the blink tag was supported in Firefox prior to v23 and any of its cousins, as well as Opera prior to v15 (where it switched to Blink and became yet another Chromium derivative). As long as your HTML wasn't total jank dependent on exact bug compatibility with Netscape specifically it should work fine on a wide variety of browsers.
To avoid breaking stuff basically, easier to have ugly UA strings than persuade every site that does weird UA parsing to fix themselves.
The main exception to this was Opera back when it had its own engine, which did use Opera at the start of its fairly clean default UA string. Then when they reached version 10 they had to make the primary version 9 with a second real version later in the string as sites couldn’t cope with two digit version numbers…
I miss Opera. It's a damn shame that it was so badly mismanaged, and ultimately sold off to investors, which further buried it into irrelevance. It now survives on gaming-oriented gimmicks and shady promotions. I hear that Vivaldi is supposed to be a continuation of it, but from what I've seen it's just another Chromium clone with a closed-source UI, without any distinguishing features.
Opera in the late 90s / early 2000s was excellent. It was lightweight and snappy. Among the first to support tabs. The Presto engine was the most performant on machines of the era. The trialware/adware was annoying, but the browser was solid. The built-in email client was decent as well.
In 2009 they launched a very interesting web server / sharing feature with Opera Unite, which unfortunately didn't gain traction.
Opera Mini was the best mobile browser for a few years as well, before smartphones took off.
>It's a damn shame that it was so badly mismanaged
I think even the best management in the world wouldn't have helped it survive the onslaught of Google's Chrome and their massive war chest in that time. It's like a team of girl scouts versus the NBA.
My personal big thing was the ability to "minimise" / deque tabs, a legacy of the really early version of tabs that were basically based around the concept of the Windows task bar (and MDI), not tabs. I'm not a Firefox user as it's the least worst option, and there used to be Firefox extensions that mostly (but not quite) did it, but Mozilla naturally broke it as part of their general view that making Firefox worse will somehow make it popular[1].
Also mouse gestures. Again, you can kinda do it with Firefox, but random stuff like the home shortcut screen don't support it nowadays because???
Also, I want a status bar. I don't care if it's old fashioned, but I want one.
Sorry if this is becoming a Mozilla / Firefox gripe fest.
[1] I don't think Opera had a nice preview view for RSS feeds, but Firefox did. Then they broke it for random reasons? Gee, raw XML is so much better than a sensible view, thank you Mozilla!
Possibly, but it wouldn't be the first time that people took a field that was supposed to be an originator name and made it something else entirely.
There's a field in the Volume Boot Record of disc volumes, in the PC compatible world, that was supposed to be the name of the OEM whose software formatted the volume. It was (and is) a few bytes of identifying human-readable text. Operating systems ended up doing string comparisons and parsing numbers, and breaking in odd ways, including not even recognizing their own handiwork, when operating system vendors did not use the name of the first vendor.
It has probably been long enough since MS-DOS 3.3 and in turn the Browser Wars that someone is right now failing to learn from history and making this mistake anew, yet again, somewhere.
Probably because now if you come with a different User-Agent you might get blocked by a WAF or a load balancer. Too much history to just forget overnight.
Because the reason it is the way it is in the first place is compatibility with sites that are doing things objectively wrong already, which makes it really hard to get them to change.
The problem is that poorly designed systems limit access or disable features based on a user-agent allowlist, which is never the right answer. There is no right way to do it because it's always wrong, but people choose to do it anyways.
I'm personally a fan of treating broken sites as broken, but I understand that realistically any "alternative" browser has to deal with all the broken sites designed for whatever came before it because otherwise most normal users won't consider switching.
If I were made King of the Internet for a day and able to enforce any changes I wanted on everyone, all the major browsers would have to change their user-agent string to something totally unique on the same day, intentionally breaking any sites that are doing it wrong for everyone so the broken sites are forced to fix their own nonsense. That'd come maybe two or three decrees down the line from "All ISPs are required to provide a globally routable IPv6 block in accordance with RFC 6177, providing only CGN IPv4 is a capital offense".