i wanted to see if my browser was just acting up or if it was really down, so i switched to the network tab in the devtools, copied the request as curl, added -v and saw that the timeout was indeed not my browser's fault.
this was six hours ago, but i still had the terminal open until now. it caught my eye because i read "AppleWebKit" in my terminal somewhere. it was this:
[more curl stuff here]
-H 'sec-fetch-user: ?1' \
-H 'upgrade-insecure-requests: 1' \
-H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' \
-v
and i wonder why i did not think about this earlier in my years of being a web developer: why the fuck is the user agent that???
so i googled it, and stumbled upon "History of the browser user-agent string" on the WebAIM blog (it's also attached under the cut for the reader's convenience). and, god, that's just sad. and the most web thing i have ever read. truly no platform ever was as bad as the web
