MSN Blocks Mozilla, Other Browsers [updated]

k_hokanson writes: "I was just going to check out some tasty news articles, with my trusty Mozilla, at MSN. but what do I get when I go there? A nice little message telling me that 'in order to display this page properly', I have to get the latest version of IE! And no, there's no option to display it incorrectly. " Enough people have submitted this story that it can't be an isolated case;) Thanks, Microsoft. Here's the story on Yahoo!. CT: telling konqueror to lie about its User Agent causes the page to render correctly save the background which is the wrong color. Update: 10/25 23:19 GMT by T : kuwan writes "Looks like Microsoft was getting too much heat. CNet is reporting that Microsoft is backing off on their browser block. I'm only wondering how long it will be before they do it again with some other excuse as to why we all need IE."

Comments

Workaround....

[sb_steele]

Apparently MS is only blocking OS's that have IE available (Win32 / MacOS)...there is hope: A story on mozilla.org shows how to change what your browser reports as its UserAgent (Customizing Mozilla). Change (or create) user.js in your Mozilla Profile directory, and place this in it:

user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22smp i686; en-US; m18) Gecko/20010110 Netscape6/6.5");

Mozilla on Win32 now gets in... But this just adds to the evidence against anything MS...

Re:I run into those every once in a while

[Dimensio]

From the story it appears to check the browser type. Apparently changing the browser type string that Opera sends by one letter gets around the problem. It also explains why Netscape 6.1 can get in when Mozilla can't.

Re:How are they blocking ?

[Tridus]

They're blocking specific ones.

eg: Opera includes the ability to spoof certain other ones, but still tacks "Opera 5.xx" somewhere in the UA. So if you simply search it for "Opera", you can block it. If they change the string to Opero for example, it will work again.

The interesting thing is that I'm not sure what would happen if you made a copy of IE using the IEAK that contained a custom UA string that had the word "Opera 5" in it. I wonder if it'd get blocked too. :)