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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."
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.
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.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
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
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.)
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
Actually, if they did their site correctly, it would work in everything but IE.
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"?
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!