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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. A better idea... by mendaliv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. 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

  3. Re:Screwed both ways by VoidWraith · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. Whining? by hkmwbz · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "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"?

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