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What would break if at this point Safri and Chrome decided to go back to a basic user agent string and abandon all of the silliness? Do any important sites do sniffing in any important way?

(I know I sniff for iPhone but that’s about it)

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Several Google sites use user-agent sniffing.

I've seen comments from Youtube devs that say progressive enhancement is too slow, so they use the useragent to choose what bundle to send.

YouTube could likely use Service Workers in modern browsers to determine what bundle to load. If so then our modern browsers could simply send [browser]/[major version] (eg. Google Chrome/78 or perhaps Blink/78) while old browsers continue to send their legacy mess.

It's worth calling Google out particularly here, because not only do they do useragent sniffing, they also launch new services that use useragent sniffing to block any browsers that aren't on a compatibility whitelist.

I get it, sometimes sniffing is necessary for some things. But it's embarrassing to see a company of Google's size and caliber so reliant on it, and to see their developers so quickly accept that they're just going to abandon what is one of the cornerstones of good web development.

Safari tried to freeze their user agent a while back, but if I remember correctly they backpedalled on their decision almost immediately.

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