The long and sordid history of the user-agent HTTP header field
I wonder why browsers with a modern automatic-update process don't set their user-agent to something that discards all this madness ("Chrome/23.4.5678 (Windows)", or similar) for the cutting-edge/nightly builds only (or even betas, if they wanted to discourage casual users from switching to them, but I don't think that's the case at this point). Surely their users have signed up for a little breakage in exchange for the latest features? And if they actually get website operators to stop or at least fix their sniffing, the whole prisoners-dilemma situation would disappear.(I guess this assumes that the huge user-agent that my Chrome is currently sending is necessarily bad, and in the real world maybe no one really cares...)