[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