Cassidy James   May 23, 2023

Web developers: when you say, “your browser does not support this site,” what you REALLY mean is that YOU don’t support the browser. Don’t turn it around on the user because you chose not to stick to well-supported standards, or worse, are doing user agent sniffing.

If you truly use some feature shipped by one browser and not everyone, at least say, “We use x standard feature, which is unsupported in this browser.” But even then, the web is all about progressive enhancement.

#WebDevelopment

Show threadKagan MacTane (he/him)

@cassidy The only case I can see for user-agent sniffing at this point is if you want to provide the user with instructions tailored to the UI they have. So instead of having to say, "On Firefox, choose the three little lines to the right of the Address Bar; on Chrome, choose the three little dots...", you can just give them the single one that applies to them.

That's all.

May 23, 2023 at 2:41pmWeb
Show threadCassidy James   May 23, 2023
@kagan yeah, sure. But it is abused so much that I don’t think it’s worth keeping around for that one use case. Heck, I get told my *operating system* is not supported by *a website* on a regular basis thanks solely to user agent sniffing. There should be zero reason for that.
Show threadKagan MacTane (he/him)May 23, 2023
@cassidy I'm not saying "Let's keep it around for that" (and I don't feel I need to, since there's no realistic risk of it going away anytime soon); I'm just saying "If someone tries to suggest 'Hey, let's do a user-agent sniff!', the only way it's getting my approval is if the reason is something like this. Otherwise, my reply will be, 'Actually, let's not.'"