Because of website development browser sniffing was made possible. Browser sniffing is a script technique usually involving properties of the navigator object that came about through website development that sets global variables signifying the current browser's brand, version, operating system, and other environment capabilities. Scripts use the variables to branch code execution in website development to accommodate browser-specific syntax for operations to work across multiple, incompatible browsers. The technique is gradually being displaced by newer website development called, object detection. Browser sniffing is the process in which the web site tries to determine what kind of web browser the user is using. This is done through website development to suit the website to the particular capabilities of the browser.
There are many types of browser sniffers that have come from website development. An example of a browser is the JavaScript Browser sniffer is a browser identifier written from website development in JavaScript and released under the LGPL license. It will tell which browser, version and operating system that the visitor is using (it's like phpsniff, but in JavaScript). Website development has made the JavaScript browser Version 0.5 works on the server-side, adds support for some browsers, bots and operating systems, adds version detection for some operating systems and adds Flash plug-in detection. Website development has produced a HTTP sniffer which allows Web Developers and Network Administrators to intercept, view and analyze all of the HTTP traffic between a web browser or any program that uses the HTTP protocol and the web server. Because of website development, with a HTTP sniffer you can view the HTTP header parameter values, cookies, query strings, the source code of HTML/XML web pages and Java/VB scripts, and error codes.
Website Development or Web Development is the process of coding or programming a website so it properly performs what the website owner would like to accomplish, such as browser sniffing. More advanced websites are developed to utilize back-end administrative or content management systems to manage the content on the website. Improper browser detection can lead to web maintenance nightmares. Rethinking the basics of when and how to detect user agents and website development is crucial to creating maintainable, cross browser web content. In an ideal world, we could author HTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript and only worry about the W3C and ECMA standards.
However, we don't quite live in such a world yet. Due to bugs, incomplete implementations of the standards and legacy browsers, web developers must be able to determine which browser a visitor is using and provide the appropriate content and scripting code path. Although browser detection is perhaps the most common scripting task that every web developer faces, it seems that the variety of different strategies in use for detecting browsers is unlimited. Most compatibility problems found on the web today are due to a lack of understanding of the standards combined with inadequate and inappropriate browser detection strategies. Although many web developers are aware of Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape browsers, far fewer are aware that these browsers are members of an entire family of user agents based upon the Gecko layout engine which includes the commercial browser CompuServe 7, and open source browsers such as Epiphany, Galeon, Camino, Kmeleon, and SeaMonkey.