I love this kind of spelunking into the history of why things are they way they are on the web!
Here, Detective Chief Inspector Suzanne tries to get to the bottom of why every browser has eight pixels of margin applied to the body element in the user-agent stylesheet.
Brian recounts the sordid messy history of user-agent strings.
I remember somebody once describing a user-agent string as “a reverse-chronological history of web browsers.”
What I want instead is an anarchist web browser.
What I’d really like to see is a browser that cuts things out, that takes things away from the web. Colors, fonts, confusion. Do you need an enormous JavaScript engine under the hood to power a modern web browser? I don’t think you do. Do you need all the extensions? All the latest CSS features? Nah, mate.
Throw away everything and start again and focus intensely about what people care about when it comes to the web.
I think Bruce is onto something here:
It seems to me that browsers could do more to protect their users. Browsers are, after all, user agents that protect the visitor from pop-ups, malicious sites, autoplaying videos and other denizens of the underworld. They should also protect users against nausea and migraines, regardless of whether the developer thought to (or had the tools available to).
So, I propose that browsers should never respect
scroll-behavior: smooth;if a user prefers reduced motion, regardless of whether a developer has set the media query.
This looks like an excellent proposal for agreement around discussing privacy on the web.
The section on user agents resonates with what I wrote recently about not considering Google Chrome a user agent any more:
Its fiduciary duties include:
- Duty of Protection
- Duty of Discretion
- Duty of Honesty
- Duty of Loyalty
This is a really interesting take on the intersection between accessibility and progressive enhancement (which I always felt was there, but this expresses it well):
Accessibility aims to optimize an experience across a spectrum of user capabilities. Progressive enhancement aims to optimize an experience across a spectrum of user agent capabilities.
Indeed, if you broaden the definition of “user agent” to include a user’s physiology, I think the concepts become nearly identical.
Ultimately you can’t control when and how things go wrong but you do have some control over what happens. This is why progressive enhancement exists.
And this is why user-agent sniffing not a future-friendly technique. A new mobile browser comes along, and it has to spoof a fake UA string to all of these sites.
It’s a Red Queen arms race.