Many / most web dev folks rely on fingerprints (user agent / screen size) when targeting layouts, adding / removing features etc.
I've been building web sites commercially since 1997. I have never done any of those things.
Unless the company you work for has the marketing or advertising department in charge of the IT department, this shouldn't happen. I'm sure that Facebook and a bunch of other terrible companies do it, but they shouldn't. The closest I ever came was during the era when you had to detect IE6 and work around that.
But, no, "most" web devs don't do that. Maybe you do. Maybe the people in your company do. But that is not "most," or even "many." I'd say it's probably not even a plurality.
To put it bluntly: If you think that's web development, you're doing it wrong.
I'd be curious if you were commercially successful.
The shift from IE to chrome was told by user agent strings. Almost EVERY web developer was tracking this and figuring out what features would work reasonably and what would not during this shift for the websites they maintained. In other words, what parts of the standard HTML were widely supported among users visiting their sites.
If you worked internationally you'll know that this was very different on a country by country basis.
Surprised to hear the claims that only a few do this. It is CRITICAL to developing useful websites -> you need to know what version of HTML to target at a minimum. Screen size, mobile vs desktop all also matter.
I'm now realizing why some web devs can charge so much - they might use these tools -> while others don't?
User agent sniffing is a bad idea and fragile. Feature detection and shims work much better. CSS media queries are quite sufficient for screen size and resizing issues.
Most importantly, none of this ican be fingerprinting unless you are sending these metrics back to your servers which is IMHO unethical.
I've been building web sites commercially since 1997. I have never done any of those things.
Unless the company you work for has the marketing or advertising department in charge of the IT department, this shouldn't happen. I'm sure that Facebook and a bunch of other terrible companies do it, but they shouldn't. The closest I ever came was during the era when you had to detect IE6 and work around that.
But, no, "most" web devs don't do that. Maybe you do. Maybe the people in your company do. But that is not "most," or even "many." I'd say it's probably not even a plurality.
To put it bluntly: If you think that's web development, you're doing it wrong.