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Opera to Stop Spoofing User Agent as IE

Posted by timothy on from the bold-new-world dept.

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."

4 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Screwed both ways by swright · · Score: 5, Informative

    gah, they *already do*!

    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? index=570

  2. Re:It's about darn time, but not really... by kronocide · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Sparked in part by Eric Meyer? by DamienMcKenna · · Score: 4, Informative
    In the past few days Eric Meyer, CSS guru and general cool guy, released a version 1.1 of his wondeful S5 presentation system. Right afterwards a part-time employee of Opera Software posted a rant on his weblog bitching that Eric gives Opera the "cold shoulder" and questioning S5's status as being cross-browser compatible. As Eric says in a follow-up blog on the topic
    Lying about S5's cross-browser nature? Giving Opera the cold shoulder? Utterly wrong on both counts. I've done everything I can to make sure Opera is still at this particular table.

    As a test Eric disabled the Opera-validation code, changed Opera to properly identify itself and ran the default S5 slideshow...
    Everything worked just fine except for two things. One, the browser window had a vertical scroll bar for no apparent reason. Two, the controls were nowhere to be found, either by hovering over where they're supposed to be or using the "C" key to toggle them.

    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