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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."
Opera has the option to identify itself as Opera, Mozilla, and IE. IE is by default, for some reason which I don't know (anyone care to explain?) why. Anyone using Opera would probably already be savvy enough to change those settings if they wanted too. But some people are just too lazy, and since there's no real benefit to it, they just leave it as is. :-) Not significantly though, but it's a step in the right direction.
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.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
What would be nice is if the search engines (google, yahoo, etc) accessed the webpages once as IE, once as Opera, and once as "Search engine", and if the static contents differ too much between the three results, ignore that page totally. Perhaps non-trivial but it'll go a long way into making the web less browser-dependent.
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.
It's irrelevant for the usage stats anyway. HTTP logs are a completely unreliable way of measuring browser usage.
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.