[esrauch]

I feel like this is with 2026 view where browsers are so mutually compatible.

In the bad old days there were so many differences between html, css and js behaviors that if you wanted your site to be nice you had to change it for the browser. The way css padding worked wasn't even the same. Feature detection was rarely viable for any of this.

No user agent would probably have only entrenched IE6 dominance even more by blocking you from deliberately making a site that works at all on other browsers (including IE7 for that matter)

[nradov]

I'm aware of that history and the User-Agent header was a mistake even back then. It took the pressure off of browser vendors and gave them an excuse to not fix their bugs.

[tyami94]

road to hell is paved with good intentions. one could argue it would've made browser vendors fix their bugs, but with the side-effect that any behavior that isn't bug-compatible with IE becomes a bug. this would've ironically entrenched IE permanently.

[smaudet]

The mistake was not claiming features rather browser client versions...

JS devs were kinda able to patch around the nonsense because they were able to feature-detect - part of the reason this stuck around was because no legitimate user or dev cared (or should care). But the header was mostly (useless) noise, and the people spoofing were dealing with the couple bad apples of the time.

Of course, defining features is easier said than done, and a standards body is a challenging environment to define these in...

I get why people are fingerprinting bots and others are working around it, but neither are "legitimate" applications - if your content is public, it's public, end of story. And working around these controls to sell botnet access to sites is equally illegitimate - nobody has a right to resell content they do not own...

[esrauch]

I just can't see how it could make sense to define features when a ton of the the behavior wasn't even intentional but just tons of bugs. I recall debugging issues that only reproduced in "IE7 compatibility mode of IE8" which didn't reproduce in either IE7 or IE8. And that was already after the standards were taken at all seriously

[14113]

> I feel like this is with 2026 view where browsers are so mutually compatible.

I wish this was the case. Unfortunately, companies that work on non-Chromium browsers need to employ dedicated web compatibility teams to either a) help website users fix non-standard (i.e. Chrome only) HTML/CSS/JS, or b) replicate Chromium-like behaviour for specific (very popular) websites so that they work "correctly".

There's also the websites that deliberately block certain browsers which is what tools like "chrome-mask"[1] are built to solve.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/

[pocksuppet]

> browsers are so mutually compatible.

Not really, there's just only one browser (Chrome). Firefox has declined so low it's a rounding error, and all other browsers are Chrome forks.

[saghm]

And you can see how well that worked by how many user-agents are such a sane, terse description of the browser rather than a hodgepodge of random words that give the impression that they're trying to seem like every browser at once.

[esrauch]

Sure that part is a specific problem which is that new browsers basically want to declare their hacks profile against people who have already written sites and won't update them.

In practice when you make your new set of hacks the string you can always evaluate whatever cruft in the useragent today, but next browser shows up.

It does make the user agents insane but I don't know if there's any obviously better system for the problem, even with hindsight