[PLUG] Web servers, browsers, and OSes

[Ben Koenig]

On 6/19/20 11:17 AM, Tom wrote:
> That's not at all how you should do things. We have graceful fallback
> exactly for this reason. You don't start blocking or whitelisting
> useragents based on features you think they have. That leads to a much
> worse user experience and anti-competitiveness as your artificially
> limiting a user's choice in useragent. Keep in mind that supplying the
> user-agent header is purely optional in the HTTP-spec and is only there
> so that issues can be reported to the right organization. Not so you
> can discriminate which browsers can visit your site. What your logic
> leads to is blocking everything who is not using Google Chrome.
>
> Regarding providing styles based on user-agent if you want a button to
> look native don't apply any styling to it. Let the OS and user-agent do
> the styling itself.
>

I agree. Perhaps the overzealous nature of my response distorted the 
point I was making. My intention was to provide an example of how it 
could be done. As I recall there were some suspicions that a website was 
disabling HTML elements for firefox which as you mentioned is not 
indicative of good web design.


Changing your user agent from Linux/firefox to windows/edge is an 
interesting way to identify if a given website is in fact engaging in 
platform discrimination.