Mostly, he's lamenting the need for it. The fact that after 3 decades this thing that every modern OS needs isn't a standard.
It actually is kind of silly that you can't depend on this stuff being abstracted, but instead must individually test it instead of asking a reference on a given system.
And yet when it comes to browser compatibility, it's encouraged, nigh necessary, to test for capabilities rather than check version strings and assume that the version string is saying something meaningful about the environment.
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36", indeed.
It actually is kind of silly that you can't depend on this stuff being abstracted, but instead must individually test it instead of asking a reference on a given system.