Actually we use to tout Graceful Degradation back in those day. Most sites were either static, rendering information from a DB, capturing simple form input, or a combination of the three. AJAX wasn't a thing and the concept of Web Apps didn't exist.

If you were checking user agents then chances are you were doing something stupid or lazy.

> Actually we use to tout Graceful Degradation back in those day.

I don't know who "we" is, but what was touted and what was actually done were, then as now, two different things. The client wanted something fancy, was only willing to pay developers who would deliver, and (crucially) was running IE as their browser. As was most of the audience for the page. Stupid or lazy it may have been, it's still what web developers did to feed their families.

Yet "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer/Netscape" was common back then.

I put one of those graphics on my very first angelfire site, because all I had was IE and I hadn't checked how it would work in anything else. When people started paying me for web development, though, I started installing browsers, operating systems, and even acquiring whole new devices (wap phones) to see how my client's sites were rendering in the real world. I spent whole nights agonizing about tiny tweaks and compatibility hacks to make sure everything looked good, this was the majority of the job in the early aughts. Now, in 2018, if you stick to a somewhat conservative set of html and css you can build nice looking sites that render great in any moderately modern browser across thousands of devices. It's insane to me that web developers now would rather descend back into compatibility hell by making their sites rely on a stack of unwieldy and opaque javascript.

Nowadays Chrome replaced IE.