On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
I can understand the rationale behind removing jQuery.browser: apparently most developers are too stupid to be trusted with it. Maybe the idea is to use per-project reimplementation of jQuery.browser as an intelligence test. The trouble is, I think even the stupidest developers are able to copy and paste.
Yes, there are legitimate reasons for using browser detection, in cases where feature detection doesn't work. The Safari segfault is a good example. In fact, VisualEditor uses browser detection to disable itself in browsers with broken contentEditable support, because it's very hard or impossible to feature-detect this. I believe Timo was working on cleaning up a different UA detection plugin somewhere on github and using that for VE's browser detection.
tl;dr: browser detection is evil, you should think twice before using it, but sometimes you have to
Roan