Testers Say IE 11 Can Impersonate Firefox Via User Agent String

Billly Gates writes "With the new leaked videos and screenshots of Windows Blue released, IE 11 is also included. IE 10 just came out weeks ago for Windows 7 users and Microsoft is more determined than ever to prevent IE from becoming irrelevant as Firefox and Chrome scream past it by also including a faster release schedule. A few beta testers reported that IE 11 changed its user agent string from MSIE to IE with the 'like gecko' command included. Microsoft may be doing this to stop web developers stop feeding broken IE 6-8 code and refusing to serve HTML 5/CSS 3 whenever it detects MSIE in its user agent string. Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied to ancient and specific version of IE. Will this cause more hours of work for web developers? Or does IE10+ really act like Chrome or Firefox and this will finally end the hell of custom CSS tricks?"

Comments

Hmmm

[BrokenHalo]

Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied to ancient and specific version of IE. Will this cause more hours of work for web developers?

Too bad if it does. Their excuses wore out long ago.

Re:Hmmm

[pspahn]

...they're gonna suffer because of MS and they don't deserve that.

Suffer? This just creates more billable hours. I'm not sure what line of work you're in, but the phrase "more work for you" isn't exactly a bad thing (as long as it's paid for!)

Re:Hmmm

[rudy_wayne]

The main culprits I've seen which do this are telephone system providers (Mitel/iPecs etc).

  The issue being that people are very touchy about updating telephony software, primarily following the old adage, "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

The problem is that it is IS broken.

Re:Hmmm

[mwvdlee]

Spoken like a true soulless manager.
If you go and "spraypaint" the wall of your company's toilets, it's "more work for the cleaners" too.
Think they'll be happy with those extra billable hours? I'm sure their managers are.

Re:Hmmm

[rudy_wayne]

Those apps aren't going away (a lot are there to meet contractual/legal obligations and aren't trivial to redevelop / recertify)

I have no sympathy for companies that used bad software. They're in their position because of bad business decisions in the first place.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Browsers and the World Wide Web in general didn't just suddenly appear one day, fully formed with a complete set of perfect specifications and standards. They evolved slowly over time. And while everything was evolving, and while everyone was trying to figure out exactly what those web standards should be, the rest of the world wasn't standing still. Billions of web pages were being created, based on whatever shitty browsers and standards existed at the time.

For a long time, it didn't matter what "standards" there were. Internet Explorer *WAS* the standard, because it was the only major browser -- there was no Firefox or Chrome -- and so that's how web pages were designed. Then when things changed, when there was competition among browsers and more emphasis on adhering to standards, there was a problem. There were all these billions of web pages and applications based on old shitty browsers. Suddenly businesses had all this stuff that worked perfectly fine in IE6 but broke horribly with any other browser. It's easy to make fun of their "lack of foresight" but back when IE6 was the only browser from a big well known company, people had no way of knowing that things were going to change tremendously in just a few years.

And so browser developers were forced to resort to all sorts of hacks and kludges to make sure that their browser properly rendered all those shitty poor designed web pages. Sure you could design a browser that refused to display all those improperly coded pages. (Hey, remember "Strict HTML"?) And you would watch usage of your browser drop to zero. When the average person goes to a page that does not display properly how many of them think "this page wasn't designed properly" versus "there's something wrong with my browser".

Re:Hmmm

[Bacon Bits]

The main culprits I've seen which do this are telephone system providers (Mitel/iPecs etc).

  The issue being that people are very touchy about updating telephony software, primarily following the old adage, "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

The problem is that it is IS broken.

There's a significant difference between "broken" meaning "functions in an anachronistic or extremely sub-optimal fashion" and "broken" meaning "complete loss of function". If you've got the latter, you'd gladly take the former.

This is why people tend to dislike new technology when it completely replaces an existing old system rather than complimenting it or existing along side it. Systems don't survive to be old if they don't meet the needs of the people who use them, and almost any new system will have some period of time where the new system does not meet their needs.

Re:Hmmm

[jc42]

Suffer? This just creates more billable hours. I'm not sure what line of work you're in, but the phrase "more work for you" isn't exactly a bad thing (as long as it's paid for!)

In economics circles, this would be considered a case of the "Broken Window Fallacy". That's the term for the belief that descructive acts (e.g., breaking windows) adds to the economy because it creates sales of replacement parts and employment for the workers that fix the damage. This is wrong, of course, because it doesn't add to the total wealth; it only shuffles money around while decreasing the total wealth. Time spent repairing damage is time lost that could have been used to create new stuff.

The concept applies in the software business, too. Real social wealth is created when someone builds software that delivers useful new capabilities. The Web as a whole is a good example of this. But software that simply does something in an incompatible way doesn't add to wealth; it merely increases the labor required to do a given job. That's a reversal of the usual "wealth" benefit of computing, which is based on the idea of replacing human labor with the activity of mechanical gadgetry, freeing human time to do more interesting things.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of history saying that people easily fall for the Broken Window Fallacy in most of its forms. In particular, manufacturers routinely "innovate" by intentionally making things that aren't quite compatible with their competitors' equipment. This is a serious drag on advances in the "Human Condition", since it's invariably a sinkhole of human time, trying to deal with the messiness and unpredictability of all the incompatibilities. We have adopted computers because they've freed up our time, not because we want to spend more time doing things that could be done quickly.

Microsoft has a well-understood history of throwing monkey wrenches into the machinery (to use another form of the metaphor), but they're far from the only ones. Pretty much any corporation with the economic clout will do the same thing, as they attempt to lock customers into their brands.

Re:Hmmm

[Sloppy]

The Broken Window Fallacy represents an overall systemic loss, but that doesn't mean there can't be localized gains. They're just gains at someone else's expense. It harms the economy to go around breaking windows, but it really can benefit someone to go around doing that. That's why "defense" contractors love war. The construction industry probably loves hurricanes. Acknowledging or advocating these localized gains doesn't mean someone fell for the Broken Window Fallacy; it merely means they might be vampiric parasitic assholes.

Really?

[lesincompetent]

I Say Firefox Can Impersonate IE11 Via User Agent String.

Amazing how it can boomerang

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft thought they could subvert the web by creating their own standards, and it worked for awhile, and now that same strategy ended up biting their own behinds. I'm enjoying this popcorn. It has Karma written in the container.

Sigh

[ledow]

The day that the first website was able to detect what client was being used to view it, we were in trouble.

Whether it was people trying to "fix" ancient Opera (and still some sites had such tests until very recently), people telling you what browser to use (i.e. not accepting Netscape / IE of certain versions - I still know of a UK bank that stops you logging in as certain browsers, but fake the user agent string and it works 100%), or just plain faffing about (i.e. iPlayer detecting the user-agent to see if it's "allowed" to download the iPad streams, etc.).

The day that you were able to tell what someone was running and make a decision based on that, we basically lost the point of a standard. If someone has a client that can't render a standard page, then that's their problem and we should have left them to it - eventually they would have complained to the relevant person and their browser would become closer to the standard. We would also have killed off abominations like non-standard HTML tags and everything else.

If you have CSS, in this day and age, that does detection of the user-agent, then that's your problem - you manage it and if it ever affects my usage of it, I'll be complaining and going elsewhere. If you have a browser that can't change the user-agent at will and still work, then that's a crap browser (purely because the user should be in control of the website they are displaying and not the other way around). Precisely because we're all too stupid to just make browsers and websites conform to a common standard.

Personally, I use Opera - have done for nearly a decade now. If it doesn't work in Opera, I move on and go somewhere else. The number of times it's stopped me doing something I wanted is vanishingly small (probably 4-5 incidents in all that time), and I've blamed the website every time - not Opera (because in every instance, faking the user-agent to something else has fixed the problem, so it's not the browser). It's cost several small companies my custom (not that they would be able to tell, or care).

Fact is, my life is too short to play games with accessing your website. If I can't, I move on. End of. I've even moved my bank accounts because of it (NatWest, in the UK, had a website that refused to work with anything but ancient versions of IE or Netscape - yes, it actually said Netscape even in the era of Firefox - and they refused to fix it "for security reasons", so I moved on. Presumably they've fixed it now, but I don't really care because the damage was done by not being able to log into it at my convenience).

You have a website because you want people to come to it and see your content. Hiding that content, because you don't know how to properly display it, is so counter-productive, I can't even begin to explain it. If the fancy shit you're pulling messed up my browser (which conforms to all the ACID tests and general compatibility with EVERY OTHER SITE on the planet), maybe you should take that fancy shit off?

Re:Sigh

[ledow]

"I'm sorry, your car doesn't have a standardised fuel cap. Is the fix to:

1) make your car have a standard fuel cap?
2) force everyone to use your new fuel cap ?
3) make pumps sense by the numberplate which model of car they are filling up and change the fuel cap to the right one each time?"

Whatever option you choose, 3) is really incredibly stupid and puts the onus on fuel stations to make the changes rather than the idiot that wanted to be different for no good reason. It might be *A* solution, but *THE* solution is to just look at the guy who can't fuel up their car with a "You pillock" look until they realise they've bought a turkey - and then let Ford / GM / whoever supply an adaptor to him rather than you having to carry 20 adaptors for all the different types of fuel cap there are.

All you've done is encourage Safari to be the exception to the rule, with a broken implementation that now doesn't have to be fixed (because you "fixed it" for them on your end).

By way of analogy, if - say - a browser can't upload more than a 2Gb file, then you're choosing to detect the browser that can't, chop the file up into little bits just for them, and pass it on. You're fixing their crappy browser for them, so you have to take all the burden for their mistakes. That's just not sensible compared to say "Sorry, you're browser is crap and can't handle downloads the size of your average DVD from 5 years ago. Maybe you should investigate alternatives."