Opera to Stop Spoofing User Agent as IE 360
Anonymous reader writes "The Opera browser will stop spoofing its User Agent (UA) as Internet Explorer. Currently Opera, by default, spoofs its UA to identify itself as Internet Explorer. This is seen, by some, as a move that will bring up Opera's usage stats a bit higher, and will hopefully make webmasters, who develop IE centric sites, more aware of Opera."
Screwed both ways (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't they just stick the word "Opera" somewhere in the user agent string, but still make like they're IE?
A better idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case, the page would refresh and the browser would lie to the webserver about what browser it is for the remainder of that session on that domain.
Best of luck to Opera though. Hopefully there aren't so many sites that will screw the browser over.
Not likely (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite my username, right now IE5/Macintosh is the bane of my existance as it is still over the magic 1.0% line.
Er (Score:4, Insightful)
Bring up the usage stats, or maybe, thanks to the websites that don't even serve you if you're not using IE, bring down the usage itself? (Hopefully not the latter!)
More aware of the standards, you mean.
Anyway, Opera has much fewer users than Firefox, so I think any difference that Opera makes will be much less than what Firefox would.... still, it's a good thing; I wonder if Opera users weren't ashamed all this while to be identified as IE users?
Re:Screwed both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera (the company) has always whined that they weren't being properly counted because of they defaulted to pretending to be IE, so it'll be good to finally remove this whine. (Of course, they can still whine about it, as they'll say it's people using older versions, or people who have changed it manually, so maybe nothing will change.)
Re:Screwed both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
Whining? (Score:5, Insightful)
In what way is pointing out the fact that sites often fail to detect Opera because it spoofs as IE by default whining?
What do you mean by "whining" anyway?
Is it whining if your browser is being discriminated against, and you make a point of that? Were the black slaves in the US "whining" when they wanted freedom? Were those who wanted to abolish slavery "whining"? Yeah, I'm purposedly exaggerating slightly, but surely you get my point.
I don't get the hostility towards Opera. The company pays several people to work with web standards in the W3C. The guy who invented CSS works for the company. Even as tiny as Opera is it has still defined what a modern browser is supposed to do. A lot of the "innovations" in Firefox and IE7 were introduced by Opera. Heck, the company even officially opposes software patents [ffii.org], so it's not even trying to prevent free software from just doing whatever Opera can do (or at least trying). Stuff Mozilla representatives are bragging about in Minimo, such as Small Screen Rendering, spatial navigation, and other things Minimo is supposedly going to revolutionize the mobile browser market with, were invented by Opera, and have been available to users of mobile phones with Opera on them for ages.
Why the constant derogatory comments about Opera on Slashdot? I mean, the first paragraph you wrote was informative, but then you just had to add that second paragraph to make sure that you showed everyone how you really think Opera is lame, "so please don't mod me down for saying something remotely positive about Opera"?
Forget granny. Different people - different needs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Whining? (Score:3, Insightful)
And often it took the form of whining ... `This report is so unfair to Opera users ... there's so many more of us than your web server logs show, etc.'
It's whining when every time soembody attempts to count how popular each browser is, somebody has to point out how innaccurate it is because `it doesnt' count Opera users properly.' If the Opera developers wanted Opera to be counted properly, it wouldn't spoof it's user agent by default. Mozilla doesn't, Firefox doesn't, Netscape doesn't, IE doesn'tSurely they were aware of the risk of not being counted properly when they made the decision to spoof their User agent. It was their decision, and they knew what they were doing. They need to live with the (minor, imho) consequences, or fix it (as they're finally doing, good for them.)
And as for the users, if they feel that it's important that Opera be counted properly, the first thing they need to do is make sure their own personal installations report their User agents correctly.
No, I don't get your point. Are Opera users slaves or something? What does any of this have to do with slavery?All I'm talking about is if Opera makes up 0.2% of the browser market, or some higher percentage. To try and compare that to slavery, well, makes it look like slavery was/is a trivial issue.
If you're asking me, you're asking the wrong person. I said nothing about Opera the browser. My comments were about Opera the company and Opera users, and probably only a small (but vocal) minority of those. I said no such thing. Your English comprehension skills may be lame, but I said no such thing about the Opera browser.Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
we need a new borg icon (Score:2, Insightful)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: ANY monoculture is a bad monoculture. It doesn't matter what the dominate monoculture is, it's always a bad thing to have a market overwhelmed by a single product. If the fanboys had any brains at all they'd welcome every non-IE browser into the market and encourage the whole passle to compete against one another, rather than blasting everything that might take market share from their precious One True Browswer(TM).
I sincerely hope that Opera and Firefox continue to take IE down a peg. I also sincerely hope that neither Opera nor Firefox ever reaches a dominant market position. It's better for everyone involved if the market for browsers remains in contention among as many products as possible.
Well, better for everyone except the fanatics, of course. But it's about time we stopped listening to their ilk anyway.
Max
Re:Whining? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Mozilla Foundation is the only one supposed to use the "Mozilla/x.y" UAS, anyone else using it is spoofing, case closed.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, the difference between Opera and Mozilla is pretty simple. Ready?
Opera = Vi. Mozilla = Emacs. Got it?
Opera = small download, very small memory footprint, a lot of attention paid to making it fast.
Mozilla = as intelligently designed as Opera, but with a different philosophy. Make it flexible as hell by adding a powerful extension language (emacs gets lisp, mozilla gets javascript). Everybody adds interpretted code to it, and eventually it becomes a mail reader, web browser, operating system, and kitchen sink...
So it's really different strokes for different folks. You like minimalism, and have a growing collection of 80's-era hardware? Use Opera. You like lots of features, and maybe enjoy hacking bits of your favorate app-becomes-OS? Use Mozilla.
Re:In Two Minds (Score:5, Insightful)
What the string should should indicate is what version of the various standards it supports. Something along the lines of:
HTML/4.0 CSS/2 PDF JPEG PNG etc.
Don't support CSS? You get the table layout. Don't support HTML 3? You get an upgrade message. Etc.
The string itself would need to be enforced by the W3C so we can't get something like MS's "we'll impliment what we want or make our own standard" attitude. Supporting CSS 2 means you support the spec entirely, and it's no indication that the browser is IE, Firefox or anything else, which means you can't code to one browser.
Re:Screwed both ways (Score:2, Insightful)
The best one yet (can't remember where) was a site that told me that I couldn't use my browser. There was a contact link so I clicked that to complain--and got yet another message saying my browser wasn't going to cut it. I couldn't even contact them thanks to some idiot web developers. I was going to look up contact information in their whois record and call and bitch but I decided I had already wasted enough time on those clowns. I don't remember what site that was, but I went to another site that had no problems with my browser and did business with them.
Companies and web developers that continue to do IE-only developer are slowly going to become obsolete. This kind of IE-only nonsense was never acceptable but they could get away with it when 95%+ of the people were using IE. That's changing more and more every day and companies are going to look less and less fondly of their own website that's throwing away 10% of their potential profits, and that percentage is growing daily!
NOTE TO TROLLS: Don't tell me a company isn't going to care about 10% of profits. If you have stock in a company that doesn't care about 10% profits, sell your stock, because it's probably going to go down soon. Companies might not develop Linux applications for a 10% market due to the R&D cost, but something like a web page that has no excuse for not handling everyone is a completely different story.