As usual, this will fuck up the users, and not the techy nerds making such decisions, but the average joe because things on the internet will be broken for them.
This solution very specifically places the burden on "techy nerds" and not users, so I'm not sure where you're coming from.
For the server side, I’m not too aware of too many cases it’s useful other than analytics, and there is too much info leakage and fingerprinting happening anyway.
So killing user agent doesn’t really seem user-hostile, save for the fact that the company doing it has near monopoly market share and doesn’t need to provide a user agent, as it’s assumed that everyone is writing code to run on Google’s browser. In that sense it’s a flex.
This kinda reminded me of the late 00's. It was quite common that the odd government or enterprise website was IE6 only.
All hail the new IE6.
There aren't really that many actual standards compliance differences between most browsers, the real problem is all the undefined garbage they are forced to run. Back when I ran a html/css/javascript validator in my browser it frankly shocked me the number mainstream sites that weren't even delivering valid html/css/javascript. In my experience developing a pretty dynamic web site (actually it was a management front-end for a rather complex application) most of our browser differences were caused by bugs that went away simply by providing correct code.
(BTW: my wife has similar problems on her mac)
>While removing the User-Agent completely was deemed problematic, as many sites still rely on them, Chrome will no longer update the browser version and will only include a unified version of the OS data.
Instead of relying on a user agent which doesn't tell the entire story web site developers will need to check whether or not a feature exists in a browser before using it.
That's a downside if it happens, but the upsides (privacy, forcing devs to use feature detection instead, etc) still means it's worthwhile.