Re: Navigator standard change proposal

On 2/12/14 4:47 AM, Predrag Stojadinovic wrote:
> ·What is gained by not allowing web developers to detect the browser
> which their code is going to be executed in?

What's gained is them not misusing the information, which is the common 
case when they do get it.

> ·Why is such detection implied to be "bad behavior"?

See 
<http://www.joezimjs.com/javascript/feature-detection-vs-browser-detection/> 
or the "Browser detection" section of 
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh475813.aspx>.

> ·What is gained by protecting browsers that do not provide established
> standards?

I'm not sure what you're asking; you seem to be making an assumption 
here that just isn't valid?

> ·What is gained by not allowing the developers to inform their users
> that some of the state of the art features will not be available and
> that they should install another browser in order to have them?

This is already allowed.  It just doesn't need browser detection; it 
needs feature detection.

> If IE was not subpar then it would not have been, as you put it,
> "targeted" by browser detection.

This is not an IE-specific problem.  Every single browser on the market 
has suffered from this; my primary experience is with Gecko/Firefox but 
I'm sure others have similar experiences to share.

And it's not even limited to browsers.  You may want to read 
<http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/2011/10/>; that sort of 
thing happens with browser detection all the time.

Or if you want some more examples of this failure mode, how about 
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217844> (where it was 
sniffing for "Netscape" and therefore didn't work right in "Mozilla" or 
"Firefox") or <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330418#c1> 
where it was trying to do something with different Gecko versions and 
broke on Jan 1 of every year for several years in a row.

> Please provide justification for Your claim here?

I hope the above links help.

> For example, the appCodeName and product attributes are completely
> useless. They each have one single fixed predefined value, so what’s the
> point of even querying them?

There is none, for new pages.  The only reason they exist is that there 
are old pages, going back 15-20 years now, that query them and then do 
something based on the values and that will fail in a modern 
standards-compliant browser if it returns the wrong values, because 
they're trying to work around some random bugs of browsers from 1995.

-Boris

Received on Wednesday, 12 February 2014 15:13:06 UTC