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Opera to Stop Spoofing User Agent as IE
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."
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 5.12 [en]
That's what they currently do.
gah, they *already do*!
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They've always had Opera and the version in the useragent string - they just have the MSIE bit in there as well.
this fools the lame IE-only stuff, but lets any sensible software detect that really it is Opera.
more info here: http://www.opera.com/support/search/supsearch.dml
Because some sites will simply give you an error page if the agent is not IE or possibly Mozilla. Since Opera is highly IE compatible, it's meaningful to circumvent that "feature" of some sites and just pretend to be an IE browser. I hope this is a sign that Opera is now common enough so that the Opera people feel confident that site owners will not filter them out.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As a test Eric disabled the Opera-validation code, changed Opera to properly identify itself and ran the default S5 slideshow...
So is it possible that Opera took this as a slap in the face and maybe are starting to change their opinion of their place in the world, i.e. "if I can't easily detect your browser I can't begin to fix my code"? Are they trying to stand up against the PR machine that Firefox has behind it to say that they're still in the running, and maybe also make life easier for web developers who'll finally be able to easily identify their browser?
No matter what the reasons, its a good decision IMHO.
Damien
All you have to do is press 'F12' to see the menu with the options to change between Mozilla/Opera/Internet Explorer. Anyone that uses a new browser would most-likely play around with all the options to get accustomed to the interface. It's not a menu that would go undetected. "Quick Preferences" is a bit attention grabbing as well. ;-)
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Have you considered installing the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox?
Do you like German cars?
Thing is, while Opera can render pages "designed for IE" just fine, a lot of sites still refuse to load if the browser's not IE. Nevermind sites like Hotmail, which deliver purposedly broken CSS if the browser detected is Opera - making the page look funny or disabling functionality like purging of the spam mail folder.
Opera makes it easy to change the browser identification (via "Quick preferences"), but still, it can be annoying. Specially for non-technical users.
Sounds like you need User Agent Switcher. Go to http://update.mozilla.org/ and look for it, it's a Firefox extension that comes in handy (though I rarely need it). You can define custom user agents in addition to the ones it includes. Here's a link, not sure if it will work as a direct link though.
p ?id=59
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
Exactly. Only really really braindead software actually misidentifies Opera, so its usage stats will likely not shoot up any significant amount. What will happen though is webpages from 1998 will have to be updated to stop checking for IE vs NS4 with silly useragent checks and start using object existance checks.
Morphing Software
Supposedly as in they claim to detect it, but I haven't actually verified it myself.
Doesn't that tell you that the "supposedly" above might be wrong? Most people agree that (even with today's flawed browser stats), Opera has at least closer to one per cent globally.
Actually it reinforces my opinion that "flawed stats" are an excuse that allows Opera Fans over-estimate their marketshare by dismissing any emprical evidence that runs counter to their assumptions (just what you did). Quite frankly, Opera's issue with stat packages are their problem, not mine, and one I'm glad to hear they are addressing.
Regardless, it's site-dependant, so it's quite possible Opera has 1% marketshare somewhere else, but on this (large, consumer, CSS2) site it's 0.2%.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I will give them props for at least supporting Firefox and Safari, but not supporting Opera specifically is just...wrong. Has anyone got Opera to render the page anyways? Does it look horrible? Looked fine in Firefox...
The more browsers there are, the more work for web developers.
;-)
Not in my experience. I've written lots of code to produce lots of web pages, and I routinely try them in every browser I can get my hands on (including several PDA browsers). In my experience, my code only really needs to distinguish two cases: IE and everything else.
And even this usually isn't technically necessary. Without the tests, the HTML that I generate will "work" everywhere, in the obvious sense that what's on the screen is usable (though not necessarily exactly the same to the pixel) with any browser.
Usually the reason for the test is that the people I'm working for insist that it do something very precisely defined and very peculiar on IE. That's what they use, and they want things exact to the pixel. They don't know or care what it looks like in other browsers, because they don't have any other on their desk, and will never see anything but the rendering with their version of IE.
So my code can send standard, general-purpose HTML to all browsers except IE. Silly things like WIDTH= attributes can be dropped, allowing the browser to resize things to fit the actual window. But special code is needed for IE, to make it look "right" on the boss's screen.
In my experience, that's what the so-called "real world" is actually like.
Of course, after everything is working and approved, I can often silently make the code default for no IE test, making the pages even work with an IE window that's not the same size as the boss's screen. The boss never looks at it again, and doesn't notice that it now works better on his other employees' screens than it did before when his silly demands were still enabled.
The "real world" can be a funny place sometimes.
(I'm not kidding here; I really have been told things like "The window must be exactly 800 pixels wide". There are many managers around that think this is a good way to specify things.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.