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The User-Agent header was a mistake. Servers shouldn't care what my client is, only that it speaks well-formed HTTP.

The servers care because for many years clients had no guarantee of handling well-formed html and javascript.

It’s still a bandaid solution that makes the problem even worse by increasing fragmentation. It’s the best way to make sure browsers never follow any standard and nothing ever gets fixed by shifting responsibility to hundreds of millions of websites individually rather than a few clients

This. It reminds me of the recycling campaigns shifting responsibility to the consumer with the transition from glass to plastic.

As a web developer though I know the agent shortcut is tempting. Without it I imagine we'd have to wait for a quorum of popular browsers before dropping feature detection for any given capability.

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