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I was under the impression that tracking users by uniquely identifying them by their browser was bad, not merely detecting their browser and its properties? Or did I miss something?

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No, you didn't miss anything. It's just that... for years, we got "browser detection is bad" thrown at us. I realize I'm conflating things a bit, but personally I never did anything like "if useragent=='mozilla' redirect to 'we only support ie.html'", although many did (back in the day). "browser detection" got a bad rap, and had been "out of favor" for a long time (or appeared to be). Yet... the only way to avoid sending down a 400k of HTML to a mobile device is to... detect the device and send down smaller amounts of stuff.

It's "bad" because its very difficult to plan for all of the extreme edge cases found on the net. If UA Sniffing was infalliable, there would be a lot more of it.

Enabling/disabling features by user agent tends to break over time. Browsers implement features, but your user agent sniffing keeps them disabled.

Or as I get a lot, you use a non-standard but standards-compliant browser and then have to spoof the user agent of one of the major browsers to persuade the site to actually use the features your browser has.

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