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Could you try the faulty operation and see if it failed?


Sometimes, but not always...

For example, the Edge bug was at [1]. It didn't reproduce when the devtools were open, it only happened if the optimizer tried to optimize it which was non-deterministic, and it would only trigger in some cases in pretty weird spots with a lot of supporting code.

Feature detecting that would be a nightmare, but UA detecting it (since I now know the exact versions impacted) is super easy and simple and the fix is extremely small. I don't have that in our codebase any more, but it was a perfect example of a bug which can't easily be feature-detected.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/1415


The problem is you can't reliability detect non-deterministic bugs, so in those cases you essentially have to use the UA to decide if you can use them.




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