4 ms·

I was under the impression that tracking users by uniquely identifying them by their browser was bad, not merely detecting their browser and its properties? Or

• mgkimsal 13y ago
  No, you didn't miss anything. It's just that... for years, we got "browser detection is bad" thrown at us. I realize I'm conflating things a bit, but personally I never did anything like "if useragent=='mozilla' redirect to 'we only support ie.html'", although many did (back in the day). "browser detection" got a bad rap, and had been "out of favor" for a long time (or appeared to be). Yet... the only way to avoid sending down a 400k of HTML to a mobile device is to... detect the device and send down smaller amounts of stuff.
  • wonderyak 13y ago
    It's "bad" because its very difficult to plan for all of the extreme edge cases found on the net. If UA Sniffing was infalliable, there would be a lot more of it.
• qu4z-2 13y ago
  Enabling/disabling features by user agent tends to break over time. Browsers implement features, but your user agent sniffing keeps them disabled. Or as I get a lot, you use a non-standard but standards-compliant browser and then have to spoof the user agent of one of the major browsers to persuade the site to actually use the features your browser has.