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."
It's about darn time, but not really... (Score:4, Interesting)
Expect IE's market share to drop a bit, and for Opera's to go up.
It's useful, but there's no reason why someone else's browser should be set by default. Don't know, I just never really understood why they did that to begin with.
All-in-all, my point was, that although this is a good thing for the numbers, it's not something largely significant.
Re:Sparked in part by Eric Meyer? (Score:2, Interesting)
First of all, Meyer might be a big CSS guru and all, but the creator of CSS actually works for Opera, and Meyer's word on browser useragent strings doesn't really make much of a difference if you are going to use Opera on real web sites.
Also, you can easily detect Opera even when you identify as IE. It still includes "Opera" in the user agent string.
So no. Meyer is irrelevant when it comes to changing the user agent string, as far as I can tell.
A Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, browsers have User Agent strings. Not all browsers are compatible with every web standard. Websites are becoming more complex (google maps etc.) and taking advantage of newer browsers. So, the question is, do we limit ourselves to the lowest common denominator (among browsers above a certain market share threshold at least), or do we make sites that can change depending on the browser?
If yes, then should the site do browser detection and serve up different pages? If not (and I think if certainly should be "not"), then how do we go about supporting an ever widening gap in browser features? Simply wait for all browsers above our threshold market share to catch up? I suppose that's what we do now, but it's quite annoying to not be able to use some nice features because of that.
Another thought: web apps (vs. installed apps) have the great advantage of being upgradeable with no user action. But eventually we get to the point where upgrades require the user to take action and upgrade her browser... So the web app just serves as a buffer to user action.
In Two Minds (Score:3, Interesting)
On the one mind, I agree it's ghastly that Opera (or Safari, or Firefox, or whatever) has to pretend to be MSIE just to get served certain web pages. Changing the string might inconvenience some users in the short term, but it'll encourage web authors to better support other browsers, which is a Good Thing(tm) in the longer term.
But on the other, aside from stats, why should it have to identify itself at all? What's wrong with something like
or similar? Groucho Marx is quoted as saying that he wouldn't want to belong to any club that'd have him as a member; I feel the same about web sites; if a site has to customise its pages for my browser, whatever that browser is, then I'm suspicious of it.Re:A better idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A better idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
www.cvs.com is one of the more major sites that block Opera. You receive an error page stating, "At this time, our site does not support the Opera browser. We hope to remedy this in the near future.".
If you write to the webmaster about it, you receive a canned reply that says they are planning to have Opera support very soon. Unfortunately, cvs.com has been giving that same canned reply for about four years.
Re:Screwed both ways (Score:5, Interesting)
Example: if they change their browser to violate the HTTP protocol when hitting the back button, so that it does the same thing as Internet Explorer does, then they will show up in logs a lot more. Now how does that equate to higher usage? It doesn't. But the stupid people who think you can measure browser usage by looking at logs will think that a load of people have suddenly switched to Opera.
Observing HTTP traffic is so unreliable, you might as well make up market share statistics. Ignore people who think they can tell you how popular a browser is without conducting a proper survey.
Good, now for the rest... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not likely (Score:2, Interesting)
i installed Opera just now, and browsed around our 4 primary applications, and they work just the same as in Firefox, Safari, and IE.
so it's not a case of "an interface that doesn't work in opera"... it's an example of a demographic (our students, faculty, and staff) who simply don't seem to use Opera in any significant numbers.