I think User-Agent sniffing is a bad idea, and here’s why:
Well, a while ago, I discovered that Google Maps had a cool zooming transition when you scrolled your mousewheel. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on Linux for some reason. It was weird, because I was using Firefox on both Windows and Linux, but the gradual zooming only worked on Windows.
I thought it might have been some “speed check” that was preventing the effect running on Linux. Perhaps it wasn’t up to the job? However, I installed a User-Agent changer plugin for Firefox on Linux, changed the OS to lie that it was Windows, ran Google Maps and got the cool zooming effect. It worked perfectly and just as smooth as it was on Windows.
So there you go. Don’t sniff for User-Agents — it’s evil.
and now Google sniffs UA to serve iPhone-only homepage… even though Nokia S60 uses the same browser engine and mobile Opera is as capable of handling that. They just don’t care…
[...] Well, as the post title states, User-Agent sniffing is teh evil. Oh, and this isn’t the first time I’ve talked about this. [...]