When Chrome originally launched, the number one issue that I found prevented users from browsing sites was those sites' poor user-agent sniffing. The browser rendered and ran these sites fine, but the sites blocked it whenever they saw its user-agent. Often, this was because they either needed to update their sniffing javascript (the site didn't understand what Chrome was), or they intentionally blocked it for "we-haven't-tested-it-yet" reasons.
I wanted to make an extension that helped everyone work around sites' bad user agent sniffing. (I also thought users would want to share their lists of 'broken' sites with each other, so that everyone's browsing experience would be smoother automatically, but I never actually got around to building that part.) But people ended up using it for lots of reasons -- as a development tool for quickly testing mobile web sites, for working around "improved" site UIs, for admins to work around legacy web apps, etc. In any case, I feel it accomplished what it was meant to do -- make people's browsing better. And it has matured to a stable -- although admittedly somewhat stale -- point.
But -- the big news! The user-agent switcher extension has been acquired by Google. Yes, that Google (see the "offered by google.com" in the description.) I didn't make any changes during the process to keep it as stable as possible. Sorry for any lingering bugs or year-old feature requests :(
I'm not directly working on it, so I don't have any more details. But it is probably safe to say you won't see a ton of changes, and it is in the best hands it could be. I imagine any future announcements will come in some other forum rather than this one -- maybe one of Google's blogs. If I see anything about it, I'll link to it from here.
More thank anything, I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who has ever submitted feedback, reported bugs, posted on my Google+, and emailed me for suggestions. It was immensely valuable and your feedback helped make the experience better for everyone using it (1.2 million people!) You probably want to keep submitting feedback on the extension's feedback page, but if you want to keep on posting to Google+/emailing me, that's cool too -- I'll pass it along.
There's a subsequent post about what I learned during the whole 7-8 year experience, but I wanted to make sure this post got out first.
Thank you all once again, and happy spoofing!
