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."

Comments

A better idea...

[mendaliv]

I would think a better way to combat the "sites that target opera users" problem would be to have a big button next to "refresh" that says "if the page looks weird click here!"

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

[NutscrapeSucks]

Our stats package can supposedly detect Opera's spoofed UA, and I'm still seeing numbers like 0.2%.

Despite my username, right now IE5/Macintosh is the bane of my existance as it is still over the magic 1.0% line.

Er

[shreevatsa]

This is seen, by some, as a move that will bring up Opera's usage stats a bit higher
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!)


...will hopefully make webmasters, who develop IE centric sites, more aware of Opera.
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? :P

Re:Screwed both ways

[dougmc]

and dammed if they don't (on the usage stats).

Of course, this assumes that it actually matters how many people use Opera, and that they be accurately counted. I suspect that it only matters for bragging rights, but I'm sure that others will say that `if enough people use Opera, we'll support it'. (Except that if they did their site correctly, it would work on any browser already.)

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

[VoidWraith]

Actually, if they did their site correctly, it would work in everything but IE.

Whining?

[hkmwbz]

"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.)"

I don't get it.

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, 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"?

Re:In Two Minds

[myov]

The Mozilla/5.0 string should also go. After all, every browser is pretending to be Netscape, and it's become redundant now.

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.