The HTTP User-Agent header was a mistake from the beginning. There is no legitimate need for the server to know what software the client is (or claims to be) running.

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parasense an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It certainly wasn't a mistake in the beginning, but it's certainly a mistake now.

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esrauch an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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 34 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	14113 31 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> 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/