Somebody please explain “Evangelism”

Since UDS I have been using Chromium instead of Firefox as a browser. It also looks like it will be the default browser for UNE.

Yesterday I tried for the first time to sell something on eBay using it. Some things about the page looked odd, not really the modern ajaxy page I’d expect. I did not find a place to upload the picture and clicking on “Save Draft” also did not produce any results. I switched to Firefox and it all worked fine. What is going on here?

I found this issue on the Chromium issue tracker which looks a lot like what I was seeing. The interesting bit is in comment 5: Making Chromium pretend to be Firefox lets the page behave as expected. So it is not a matter of Chromium not being able to display the enhanced page but of eBay not issuing it to Chromium browsers. Wow!

The bug was tagged as “Evangelism” but I cannot really find a definition of the term in this context. I suspect it has something to do with Mozilla’s Technology Evangelism which sounds like a good thing at first. How can it cause bugs like that? Would somebody please care to explain?