Please, not another hack of the user-agent string.
If sites break, let them break.
If sites break, let them break.
For some tightly-controlled environments (medical, aerospace, etc...) where all software components & tooling has to be qualified for use, I can see checking the UA in order to throw up a "your browser is not supported" banner ("not supported usually means "we haven't tested it, so we can't assert this web app will work properly", not so much "our app won't work"). But sites should really avoid responding with different content/html, etc.... for different browsers (though, I have encountered sites that serve images as webp to chrome and jpg to IE...)
This are places where you don't automatically upgrade browsers but keep them at one specific version. No rocket/airplane wants to stop working because something changed.
It is also places which are good at writing contracts that can ensure such things to work, so these places should not be a concern.
It's likely cheap shoddy sites that will be a problem. The ones that think jQuery is too advanced tech.
That's incredibly arrogant, IMO. Imagine the amount of pointless work that would cause world-wide, and the cumulative amount of pain experienced by readers of the web for years.
It's pure value destruction on a global scale, just making things worse to prove a point.
A better solution is to realize that the UA header has been completely broken for decades and do yet another compat hack, whilst transitioning to some more futureproof mechanism.
The web needs a Linus occasionally screaming: don't break things for shits and giggles.
With the Chrome "backup plan" literally everyone will have to modify their code to make it work, making it more convoluted in the process. With the "well, just break stuff then" only the small number of people who relied on a fixed width of the version will have stuff break. This seems like a decent enough trade-off, and will almost certainly save programmer time globally.
I don't understand. If you need to detect a >99 version, then yes, you'll need to update your code, but you'll need to do that anyway, to add your >99 logic in the first place. If you don't need to detect that, then no changes are needed, and as a bonus no poorly-coded sites will break.
They were built by a PhD candidate in 2012 and the source has been lost to the mists of time. It's still critical to the research group's workflow though, so they switch to Edge instead of rewriting it . A month later they encounter an article on HN asking "Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?"