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I imagine there are some stories out there of people tearing their hair out over issues in prod can’t be reproduced in localhost (or vice versa) due to quirks exceptions.

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When I was at Twitter we had several engineers spend an afternoon trying to figure out why we were seeing different behavior for opening links (IIRC?) on iOS 14.5 (?) versus previous versions. Turns out that the WebKit team in their infinite wisdom had added some sort of change to how this worked several months back, realized it broke Twitter, then committed a change to restore the old behavior specifically for us. Of course, they also didn’t want to keep this around forever, so they also checked the iOS version to disable this behavior after 14.5 (?). Which is all well and good, except they never told us about this at all. So of course we find out about it when I, being well acquainted with Apple’s stupid quirks process, find the Slack thread where everyone is confused what is going on, identify where the bug is coming from, then do a search in WebKit for where they hardcoded the behavior for us. So thanks, WebKit team. You’re really doing a great job pushing web compatibility forward :(

The least they could do, which they don't, is log a console warning when a quirk is activated.

That's actually a great solution.

I was tinkering with some Instagram code the other day and a console message appeared in dev tools saying (roughly) "Did someone tell you to mess with this? If they did, they are probably trying to scam you. Stop what you are doing."

I wonder why browsers don't show a bit of UI that it's in compatibility mode and give a way to disable (or enable for other domains for dev/testing).

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