On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 11:31 PM, Chris Peterson <cpeter...@mozilla.com> wrote: > Are there recent studies of which features servers do detect and why? I > could see arguments for sharing information about mobile devices, touch > support, and OS.
Long ago I used to do development for MediaWiki. We had UA string checks to work around certain UA-specific bugs where no other easy workaround was possible. I remember one particular bug in Firefox (which was only fixed years later) that I spent considerable effort trying to figure out how to work around without a UA string check, and eventually gave up. It was something like: if you append #foo to the URL while the page is loading in order to jump to <span id=foo>, but that element has not yet loaded when you set the URL, every other browser would jump to the element when it was added to the DOM, but Gecko would not. So I checked for Gecko and set the hash again onload. I didn't want to do this for non-Gecko browsers, because it would degrade the user experience (delaying the jump until the whole page loaded). And I couldn't figure out any reasonable way to detect it without UA sniffing. Sometimes browser behavior is just not reasonably detectable other than by UA sniffing. Yes, authors should use other methods if practical, and when I was a web dev I always would, but sometimes it's just not practical. Sometimes it's not even possible. This particular example did UA sniffing from JavaScript, not HTTP headers, but it illustrates why authors do need access to this information, and always will. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
