"VanguardLH" wrote

| Seemed you intended to insult me with my mention of [disabling]
| extensions,

Not you personally. As I described, I think it's inconsiderate
to tell people to do all these stock things first when it's rarely
the problem. The trouble is that it's time consuming. What do
I do when a page doesn't work? Usually the first thing I try
is disabling CSS. Then I might look at the source code. (I
realize that not everyone can do that.) If I *must* access the
page I'll try enabling javascript in stages. I also noted that one
can have an up-to-date browser for XP, so that doesn't need
to be an issue. But the most common problem I see when a page
won't work with script is unnecessary UA sniffing.

I should note, though, that I don't normally enable script and
I don't do online banking, shopping, etc. So my needs are
limited. But the woman I live with repeatedly runs into UA
problems that result from sniffing, not actual incompatibility.
Unlike you, I have no religious beliefs about UA. If I'm using
FF52 or New Moon on XP there's no reason that calling it
FF79 on Win7 shouldn't work. If there's a rare case where it
still won't work then I haven't lost anything. I also do it for
better anonymity. I don't want to be the only XP/New Moon
visitor they've seen all month.

Lately, the biggest problem I see is sites trying to force script
for spying and ads. They do things like cover links with a
transparent DIV so you can't click them. Or they cover
the whole page with a white DIV that's only removed by script.
Devious stuff. So I use my trusty CSS toggle button on the
toolbar. But script has become so standardized now that I
sometimes find it's better to block it. For example, my friend
can't access some newspaper sites that work fine for me with
script disabled.

The other day I had a link to an imgur page that I couldn't see.
When I looked at the source code there was no image link. It
looked like the page required script to call back to some kind
of backend process to load the image. Yet they had also put in
a NOSCRIPT tag to make sure Google could still spy on me, even
if I saw a blank page! Do people even understand what they've
done? I doubt it. Most webmasters today don't know how to code.
They're lackeys who run WYSIWYG frontends in corporate offices.
Even the people writing the code are typically just pasting together
snippets of script that they don't understand. Their friends are
using lazyload images so they use lazyload images. Why? Because
with only 1 MB of script libraries they can reduce the image loading
on webpages by a whopping 200 KB, saving gobs of traffic.

Do I try disabling extensions? No. That's generally irrelevant.
But I guess if you use uBlock Origin then that's relevant. That
actually will alter the rendering. My extensions, except for
NoScript, are mostly just GUI stuff. So I would say *if you
have extensions that edit webpages* then you might try
disabling those.

As it happens, though, I actually sniff UAs on my own site.
But for good reason. I go by the now-outdated standard that
a webpage should work without special requirements in as
many browsers as possible.

Older IE versions don't render the same
way as other browsers and were very slow to acommodate
CSS. My webpages are designed to be completely free of script,
but the flyout menus won't work in older IE versions. So I
have one code version for menus and layout issues in IE
and another for all other browsers. Then MS came out with
IE11 and broke quirks mode/ compatibility view. And they
came out with Edge, which I couldn't even test without
buying Win10, and which broke IE compatibility. Then they
came out with Chrome Edge. So my pages are designed to
work on any browser from IE6 to IE10 and all other popular
browsers, with virtually any version.
If someone visits with original Edge or IE11 they get
instructions on the myriad ways they can see my pages
Either set compat mode for IE11 or if it's Edge, then use
**any** other browser.

So I'm using UA sniffing to help visitors see my pages
with minimal requirements on their part. That's very different
from the current epidemic of demanding the latest browser,
which is more like the teenage hotshots in the 90s who would
load their site with ActiveX and Flash, then on the home page
they'd put a note like,
"This site best viewed with Internet Explorer version 4.093.21443.8"

But at least the teenagers told you why you couldn't see
their webpages! Which is an interesting point. The attitude
today is a kind of non-existent standardization. You're responsible
for the rendering as the viewer. It's expected that you have the
decency to be a non-techie person who's getting constant
dripfeed updates on a cellphone and has no understanding of
security or privacy. So they can do as they like with you once you
load their URL. The commercial, spyware, ad-infested Internet
depends on that. And now they're cracking down. If you don't
comply they'll do their best to break the page so you can't see it.