browser detection…

…an obsolete approach

Separating and targeting browsers by extracting and interpreting their User Agent strings, is a pretty withered and unreliable idea and technique by today's standards.

It became unreliable over a decade ago, when users learned about, and started using, User Agent spoofing to bypass the “include this and exclude that browser” practice quite a few web sites applied back in the twentieth century.

Why some sites still target browsers using this technique, is difficult to understand. Why anyone needs browser detection now is even more in the fog, as all major browsers handle whatever they are served well enough for comfort.

CSS hacking is equally obsolete, but…

Most front‐end coders know by now that “you simply do not hack new browser versions”. That we still see it happen today is something I find very hard to understand.

As browser‐updates take place every few weeks, hacking new browsers to “fix” real or imaginary rendering flaws means whole series of hacks will also have to be gone through and updated every few weeks to make sure they don't affect the wrong browsers, or cause the wrong effect in the right browser.

Such repeated checking and fixing of code behind a site, is a hopeless and pretty nonsensical task. No-one in their right mind would take on such a task, unless browser hacking is what their lives are all about.

On the other hand, hacking old browsers that one simply has to support for whatever reason, is considered to be perfectly alright by most. And, whether they admit it or not, all web site developers/​coders do insert CSS hacks and/or build workarounds to make old browsers play ball.

What matters then is that such hacks should never have to be updated as new browser versions arrive, and, preferably, that they can be removed in whole blocks or entire stylesheets when they are not needed anymore.

As of August 2016, support for IE8 and older, is dropped on this site. All stylesheets for them are disconnected.

…qualified CSS hacking does work

Browsers like IE8 – still used by many – simply won't work without tailored styling, as it fails to support half of what more modern browsers handle just fine. To avoid putting limitations on what modern browsers can be served, some form of style‐separation between old and new browsers is necessary.

I do not promote the use of non‐valid hacks, but fact is that carefully crafted non‐valid hacks tend to be most reliable. The less valid and more “backwards” hacks we use to serve old browsers what they need, the less chance there is that today's and future browser versions will ever pick up these styles.

These days I mainly serve all recent browser versions progressive, agnostic, and in places somewhat complex CSS constructions. This is to see how they react, i.e. CSS capability testing across entire sites. Intentionally, this may make different browsers render parts of a design different, but not where or in such ways that it will seriously hurt my designs.

I continue to play around with CSS hacking, but apart from utilizing some pretty safe and reliable CSS hacks to make some quite old and obsolete browsers play ball, I don't use CSS hacking to target browsers for anything serious.

browser agnostic at last

As we write spring of 2014, it should not matter which of the new browsers our carefully crafted web designs gets rendered in.

Cross browser styling is the only methodology that makes sense today, and tomorrow.

While performing cross browser testing of my designs, I have of course observed occasional flaws, bugs and regressions. No real show‐stoppers for rendering in browsers released the last year or so though.

I see enough improvements in today's browsers compared to only a year ago, to expect real standards support and cross browser rendering improvements in major browsers built for regular computers, tablets and smartphones in the next twelve months.

That we still will have to “style complete” – add seemingly redundant property/value pairs for some elements – to make sure all browsers render the same regardless of how they interpret standards, is in my opinion not something we have to divide and hack browsers to solve.

sincerely 

Hageland 07.mar.2014
29.mar.2014 - modified a paragraph or two.
16.sep.2016 - minor revisions, and added "IE8 gone" note.
22.nov.2017 - replaced 'Browser Targeting' text in side-notes.
10.oct.2020 - updated.
last rev: 10.oct.2020