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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

It's wild to think that everything we've collectively learned as an industry is being forgotten, just 20 years later.

- We're on the verge of another browser monopoly, cheered on by developers embracing the single controlling vendor;

- We already have sites declaring that they "work best in Chrome" when what they really mean is "we only bothered to test in Chrome".

- People are not only using UA sniffing with inevitable disastrous results, they're proclaiming loudly that it's both necessary and "the best" solution.

- The amount of unnecessary JavaScript is truly gargantuan, because how else are you going to pad your resume?

I mean really what's next?

Are we going to start adopting image slice layouts again because browsers gained machine vision capabilities?

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> People are not only using UA sniffing with inevitable disastrous results, they're proclaiming loudly that it's both necessary and "the best" solution.

Since you're replying to my comment and paraphrasing a sentence of mine, I'm guessing I'm "people".

I'm curious to hear from you on what - if any - is a better alternative that can be used to determine the browser identity or characteristics (implied by name and version) on the server side? "Do not detect the browser on the server side" is not a valid answer; and suggests to me the person proffering it as an answer isn't familiar with large-scale development of performant web-apps or websites for heterogenous browsers. A lot of browser inconsistencies have to be papered over (e.g. with polyfills or alternative algorithms implementations), without shipping unnecessary code to browsers that don't need the additional code. If you have a technique faster and/or better that UA sniffing on the server side, I'll be happy to learn from you.

"Do feature JavaScript feature detection on the client" is terrible for performance if you're using it to dynamically load scripts on the critical path.

I'm sorry you're going to have to pick an argument and stick to it before I can possibly hope to respond. Either performance is so critical that a few kb to do feature detection is too much, or line performance has improved so much that 2MB of JavaScript for a text box and two buttons is "acceptable". You can't have it both ways.

We're also back to table layouts with grid, albeit a lot more usable this time around.

I don't recall that there was ever anything inherently wrong with using tables for layout, except that it was a misuse of tables so we were told it wasn't "semantic". Thus you had years of people asking on forums how to emulate tables using a mess of floating divs until flexbox/grid came around. In retrospect, tables are also clearly incompatible with phone screens, but that wasn't really a problem at the time.

One, it made the code unreadable and impossible to maintain properly, especially since most of those table where generated straight out of photoshop or whatever.

Two, it was an accessibility nightmare.

At least modern grid design fix those

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