4,383 karma · joined January 2, 2010
To the author, did you ever consider contacting the Chrome dev team about this? They're pretty responsive to bug reports.
I wrote more about it here: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2017/04/a-tale-of-datacenter-sec...
User Agent strings aren't used for feature detection, they're used for classification. As a developer, when you're trying to fix a bug reported by a customer, it helps to know exactly which browser right down to the patch version that bug shows up in so that you can try and reproduce the bug in the same environment.
I posted this 11 years ago: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2011/01/device-width-and-how-not...
It's not a trend, it's been around as long as it's been possible. Site owners dislike letting their users have control.
They had all the answers stored in the source code. I wrote up a quick perl script to play the game and unfortunately left it running overnight, and in the morning there were complaints from other players asking how I'd reached the top rank so quickly.