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

[rwa2]

Heh, all they had to do was offer IE6 in a VM to allow all the businesses and government organizations to still run all of the old crappy homegrown locked-in apps to run. Those apps aren't going away (a lot are there to meet contractual/legal obligations and aren't trivial to redevelop / recertify).

Re:Hmmm

[jimshatt]

Except that it wont. If the business app was tied to a specific version of IE, then it still is tied to that specific version of IE. IE6 still sends out MSIE, regardless of the existence of IE11, IE12, or IEFoxHunt.

Re:Hmmm

[jimshatt]

And why is it Microsofts job to do this? No-one is stopping those organizations to do this themselves.

Re:Hmmm

[pspahn]

Acutally, yeah, I manage the entire team here at my office... at home... consisting of myself... and, oh wait it's just me.

You can either bitch and moan about corporate lack of vision (or bureaucratic weight, or whatever you want to call it) or you can knuckle down and fix the shit they pile on everyone else's plate... and get paid for it.

I prefer to be the guy people can call when they want someone else's shitty mess fixed, rather than be known as the 'unapproachable tech guy'.

I've spraypainted nothing... But if someone wants to pay me to come clean it up, I have a contact form I can direct them to.

Re: Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your boss sounds like a total opportunistic douche.

Re:Hmmm

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Yes that is all they have to do and surprise, surprise, they do it:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575

Re:Hmmm

[Bengie]

Your analogy assumes there were toilets in the first place. Some times it's better to bite the bullet and do things correctly instead of complaining about each time some fragile software breaks because of bad design and bad practice.

Re:Hmmm

[Bengie]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[jimicus]

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

They did, but business apps that are tied to specific versions of IE are endemic and quite often it's not as simple as paying money and getting the software updated. We're not talking one or two apps here that need updating; we're talking hundreds if not thousands of applications, some of which quite clearly haven't had any major UI work done in five or ten years.

In the last fortnight, I've seen - and this is in just one small business:

  - A web app that requires a specific ActiveX plugin to print - evidently a stylesheet for printing or even generating a PDF is too difficult. This plugin only works on 32-bit versions of IE; under 64-bit versions the plugin installer silently fails to work. (The plugin developer does have a 64-bit version available, but it's commercial software. You can't just download a 64-bit version from the developer's website yourself).
    - This web app is provided for franchisees by their franchisor. (I won't name the franchise, but I guarantee you've heard of it). As with any franchise-type arrangement, the franchisee can ask their franchisor nicely but cannot force anything - and in this case, the franchisee simply cannot say "In that case I won't use your tool; I'll find something else to do the same job", using it is a condition of the franchise.
  - Several web apps that require you to explicitly click the "broken mode" button in IE - they're generating IE6-only HTML when IE is used but IE isn't detecting this and automatically downgrading.
    - Quite often these apps will work just fine with Chrome, Firefox et al. It looks like they're detecting an IE User-Agent string and generating IE-6 specific HTML rather than checking the IE version.
    - These apps are provided by a third-party and you have to use them otherwise you can't do business with that third party. The business itself doesn't care about your idealistic attitude that IE-dependant websites must die; they need to meet payroll this month and one of the ways they do this is by working with various third parties.
  - Web applications that quite simply do not function in anything but Internet Explorer in any form, no matter what you do with your user-agent string. You'd be amazed (and faintly disturbed) how many project managers read as far as "no need to deploy your own client app" when first considering web development and didn't get the bit about "with careful development, client platform independent".
      - Much of this is actually Microsoft's own doing - they purposely encouraged this sort of behaviour back in the days of IE6.

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

[Sulphur]

I'm hourly as well, but if I weren't, the analogy would be more like a dog shits on your lawn: you can either leave it there to turn white or you can pick the shit up. Either way, your life sucks a little bit more.

Of course if it turns white, then it is left there as part of the decor.

Re:Hmmm

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Too lazy to follow the link?

It's a virtual machine, works perfectly fine on VirtualBox and thus on Linux and OSx.

Re:Hmmm

[MightyYar]

Dung shui?

Re:Hmmm

[CastrTroy]

MS could have alleviated a lot of pain everywhere if they would have just added a supported method of running 2 versions of IE at the same time. This way they could have continued to support businesses that were locked into corporate intranet applications that wouldn't work in anything but IE 6, and also have newer versions of IE be able to adopt proper standards without having to worry about how it affected older websites.

Re:Hmmm

[StripedCow]

This is called the "broken window fallacy".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes the assumption that the money would be spent on something else when the true objective of the game is to hoard as much as possible.

Re:Hmmm

[AmiMoJo]

Actually MS offer a compatibility mode in IE that runs the old IE6 engine in a sandbox. You can create a whitelist of sites thatwill auautomatically use it. No need for a VM.

Re:Hmmm

[Ash Vince]

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.

Exactly.

I used to work from 2002 to 2005 as a web developer for a company who mostly contracted to graphic designers. At the time they expected to things to work on IE5 (the Mac version of course). They did not really care about Firefox (although it did exist then, but with zero non-techy users).

I threw together god knows how many sites in the 2-3 years I worked at that company. All we did was offer the client a choice: If they wanted firefox support, they paid extra. Almost nobody bothered. We were a budget development house so our margins would not support the extra work of supporting all the IE hacks needed and the more W3C firefox unless the client paid extra. They all required the sites to work perfectly in IE though obviously.

I tried to make sites work in Firefox just out of a sense of professionalism on a few occasions but the problem is that then you appeared to have a far slower work rate than the rest of the team who took the IE only short cut they were told to by the technical manager. He was also a developer, director of the company and joint owner so he made an informed decision not to support anything other than IE from technical perspective and was able to see if you were ignoring it. If you ignored it that was fine, but you still had to keep up with the other devs simply by putting in overtime.

It only took other browser to get a market share above 5% - 10% for things other than IE5 / IE6 under Windows and suddenly clients were interested in supporting other browsers. In 2002 - 2004 though IE was so dominant that nobody cared about anything else in the real world as only geeks bothered to change their browser. Making things IE only remained common place in commercial web development right up to 2005 - 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

I remember having to spoof using IE under Linux in order to access my online banking (from HSBC) as they considered all other browser to be too insecure :)

Re:Hmmm

[SenseiLeNoir]

If I had mod points, I would award you all of them.

Its easy for some "Younglings" today to criticise what happened then. I personally didn't like IE back in 2000(Active X drive by installs, toolbars, and standards compatibility). Hell, life was bad back then (1997 - 2004) when Nutscrape and Exploder each having their own view of "Standards" (I am ignoring the Mozilla Suite and Netscape 6/7 as both never truly gained critical mass, and were not really for the masses anyway).

Until Firefox was released in 2004, there was no credible standards based browser, apart from the rather good Opera, which was pay ware at the time. Even then it was the surge of appalling viruses and drive by installs on IE, that finally got people to notice Firefox with its better security, and seduced by features such as pop up blocking and tabbed browsing.

Thanks to the efforts by Mozilla, which were then cemented later by Apple with Webkit/Safari, Standards Compliance has become a desirable feature for browser developers, rather than a drag.

Even Microsoft has slowly gotten their act together, and improving their own standards support.

Today we are in a better place, but its easy to forget how bad it was. even though Firefox was released in 2004, it still took a while to overtake IE.

In companies, where they are very much into standard installations and frowning upon installing software, it wasn't until Windows 7 came that IE 6 was eventually replaced together with XP. Therefore coding for the crappy standards of IE6 was the only realistic path available.

Its easy for most of us working in Tech companies to say otherwise, but in other companies like banking, and government, its a different environment.

Re:Hmmm

[Runaway1956]

And - why do we CARE whether they are trivial to redevelop / certify? If they need the app, and the app doesn't work any more, they'll pay. If they don't pay, they don't have the app. I see no problem here. The scrambled bullshit is going away, one way or another. And, few of us really give a damn that it's going to cost the corporations something. Eventually, IE6 in a VM will no longer be an "acceptable solution" for getting things done.

As for the triviality - maybe what you're saying is, all the geniuses have passed away or something? Today's crop of hackers don't have the intelligence to reproduce yesterday's results, using the tools available today? Are you the result of the infamous "dumbing down of America"? Are you incapable of doing what your predecessors have done, even with their finished product in front of you?

Oh well. Maybe you can join the illegal aliens in digging ditches and roofing houses. Surely there is a future for a failed IT guy.

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

[jc42]

spoof the user agent back to MSIE

So that the served content is for IE6-8 ... [which doesn't work with IE11]

Part of the fun here is that IE has "spoofed" FF and the other Mozilla browsers all along, by including "Mozilla" in most forms of its User-Agent string. I see this all the time, when I test my web sites against various versions of IE. This has always been a minor problem for web developers, since it's easy for software to misunderstand such things. You might think you've got a test that successfully distinguishes real Mozilla-type browsers from IE, but then MS releases a version with a tweaked User-Agent string that your RE doesn't parse quite right, and your code sends the wrong style of HTML to the browser.

I've occasionally wondered why the Mozilla gang hasn't charged MS with trademark infringement for such monkey-wrench tactics. After all, if I were to start providing a browser whose default User-Agent string included the "MSIE" token, MS's lawyers would be all over me. But they use their main competitor's brand name with impunity. If the Mozilla crowd weren't such nice guys as to allow this, life might be a bit easy for web developers everywhere.

Actually, quite a lot of browsers provide a list of User-Agent strings, and let a user choose one. This is probably legal, and is occasionally useful, especially to developers. But it's annoying and a waste of developers' time when vendors are allowed to install a lying User-Agent string as the default. It would improve matters for a lot of us it this were legally considered consumer fraud, trademark infringement, or whatever other legal terms apply.

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.

Re:Hmmm

[MightyYar]

true objective of the game is to hoard as much as possible.

You can't build wealth by hoarding money. People only flee to cash when there is (1a) a ton of uncertainty or (1b) very high interest rates and (2) low inflation. The last crisis nearly sank a bunch of companies that could no longer depend on loans. Count my company as one which has spent the last few years de-leveraging and socking away money for the next downturn instead of growing.

Re:Hmmm

[Acaeris]

The Mozilla tag in most UAs is a compatibility tag for the Mozilla rendering engine and in the case of IE, is a leftover from it's fight against Netscape. So in reality, it's never spoofed Firefox. Everything just spoofs Netscape.

Re:Hmmm

[GreatDrok]

I have mod points but what the hell - this is bull. Everyone knew IE wasn't even following the standards of the day. The problem was that MS was busy tying IE and Windows together to migrate one monopoly into another and worse, IIS was serving deliberately broken HTML to make IE appear faster since MS had control of both ends of the equation.

IE was the standard on Windows, and it was even available in Mac and Solaris although those didn't really use the same code base or rendering engine so to say IE was the standard is disingenuous at best because IE on Windows wasn't even compatible with IE on Mac which actually had far better CSS support. Also, lets not forget that before Firefox, there was Mozilla which was the result of Netscape open sourcing Netscape 5 which was in development in the late 90s. Since they pulled a lot of commercial code out of it, the early builds were pretty badly broken but that was all we had on Linux and the web was a mess mainly because of Active X, rather than HTML. And that is where it really comes down to it, you can work around problems with HTML in different browsers, but Active X was an MS only technology developed specifically to do an end run around Java Applets. Both AX and Java Applets were a terrible idea.

Let's look at 2002 or so when IE6 was king of the hill. MS had IE for Mac still but the Solaris port was long gone. Apple looked at Mozilla's Gecko and KDE's KHTML and chose the latter to build a new browser around and they forked it to produce webkit but contributed the changes back as required by the license. In 2003 Safari appeared with OS X Panther and MS threw a shit fit and took their ball home declaring it impossible for them to develop IE on Mac when Apple clearly had info about the platform that would make Safari better (hint MS, only you did that) so the long slow decline of IE started as Apple pushed Webkit forward towards HTML5 standards, Mozilla stripped all the crap (email and news client) and released Firefox and eventually webkit found its way into other browsers, and then dominated tablets. In the end, it is tablets and phones that have proven the undoing of IE because while Firefox and Chrome have done well on Windows, IE is still quite popular, but really people are using desktops less and less and phones and tablets more and more so sites have to work with those and this means the same sites also work well with webkit and gecko based browsers so the thing that kept MS on top is gone.

People knew way back what MS was doing, but managers and developers using MS tools didn't care and so they put out non-standard sites and now that is coming back to bite them. The question is, are we doing it all again with Webkit at the expense of Gecko? Shouldn't MS be claiming to be Webkit rather than Gecko?

Really?

[lesincompetent]

I Say Firefox Can Impersonate IE11 Via User Agent String.

Re:Really?

[a0me]

We Need To Go Deeper.

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.

Headline and Summary Mismatch

[Internal Modem]

Wouldn't a better headline be "IE 11 user agent string changes from MSIE to IE," since most of the summary is about that?
The headline isn't even discussed in the summary.
However, it's obvious the standard ability of browsers to report a different user agent for dev and testing has been sensationalized here just for click generation.

Re:Headline and Summary Mismatch

[sexconker]

Oh, sorry to burst your bubble - no, Firefox/Chrome/Safari et. al. all require just as many hacks as modern IE versions to ensure consistency across all browsers to the greatest extent possible.

Any evidence for the "just as many hacks" assertion or did you just pull this out your ass?

True story: Chrome gives me far, far more issues than IE 9 or IE 10.
And if your shit works in Chrome on Tuesday it'll be busted on Thursday, only to be partially fixed on Wednesday.

Even from a user perspective I have no idea why people use Chrome outside of Google fanboyism. It's got ads and tracking out the ass with limited options to block/remove that shit, but it runs some shitty javascript benchmark a little bit faster? Who gives a shit? I'd much rather turn off shitty javascript on shitty sites via NoScript than have it complete 2 milliseconds faster. The time I save by not downloading ads (ABP in FF) vs. downloading them and then hiding them (Chrome) is orders of magnitude more significant anyway.

You don't say!

[T-Bone-T]

Business apps designed specifically for IE6 might not work with IE11? I'm shocked! That's terrible! What is this world coming to? Or should I say, to what is this world coming?(don't answer that)

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

[Spad]

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

They haven't. You still have to fake UA strings to use most browsers with their online banking site.

Re:Sigh

[Xugumad]

> 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

Well, sort of. If the browser gets the standard wrong, and the options are:

1. It doesn't work for that browser.
2. Degrading the result for everyone.
3. Implementing a browser-specific work-around.

Which would you really prefer? Yes, user agent testing is heavily mis-used, but it's not the terrible idea it's made out to be.

I'll give you a specific example; we had an issue with file uploads with Safari over SSL. For some reason if the connection was kept alive, Safari would frequently start uploading the file but never complete. The work-around was to force connection close for Safari; it wasn't perfect, but it massively reduced the frequency with which the issue appeared.

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."

Re:Sigh

[twdorris]

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.

Are you new here? You may not remember the days when this mess all started. IE was king and you *had* to work around it. You couldn't just let it be "their problem" and "left them to it". That's so "counter-productive, I can't even begin to explain it". These customers (sheep running IE) would come to *you* in droves asking why they couldn't view your website. And your response was going to be "because IE doesn't display my standards-compliant page"? Wow...no...that doesn't work.

Nowadays, things are clearly different. Which is great. But to suggest developers should have never used the user-agent tag to distinguish browser differences is ludicrous.

Re:Sigh

[ConceptJunkie]

And your solution puts the onus on the user to become an expert in software. The whole point of the exercise is to give the user what he wants/needs. If some part of the system is broken, it usually ends up being someone downstream or upstream that gets the blame. After all, if you are refusing to support broken browsers, then you might be encouraging a gigantic company to fix their software (yeah, like that ever happens, short of a world-ending cataclysm), but you are also jeopardizing your users' experience and ultimately your own business. Playing hardball like you suggest, however tempting it may be, and it's _very_ tempting, costs your website users, and that means fewer customers. At some point you might have to decide to cut your losses, but as a website developer, just like any other software developer or anyone providing a service or product, you _must_ bend over backwards to give your customers the best value/most convenient experience/best service possible.

It's an ugly situation, but we should be thankful that Mozilla and other competitors have gained enough ground against the Evil Empire that there _are_ alternatives... and that the Evil Empire has had to react in response to chinks in their monopolistic armor. Unfortunately, that leads to the temptation of "This website works best in $BROWSER."

I guess the ultimate question is: Should we be able to treat browsers like telephones? No matter what kind of telephone you have, at some point it either allows you to call other telephones or it doesn't. Beyond that, they are all essentially identical to the person placing or receiving the call.

Re:Sigh

[NewWorldDan]

I specifically prohibit my developers from looking at the user agent string. Heck, I use IE9 as a browswer, and I've changed the user agent string to 'null'. Anyway, if it doesn't render correctly in Chrome, Firefox and IE, then we find a new way of doing things. Browswer specific code is never allowed. Not even for detecting mobile browsers. There's already a link to the mobile version. If they want to use the main site, that's their business.

So Microsoft hurt itself?

[erroneus]

Well... yeah but no. Their being different enough to make everyone else think all the other browsers were broken worked. Only web deveopers knew differently. And the business apps only worked under MSIE thing ensured people wouldn't migrate their client machines from Windows.

I have to wonder what Microsoft will pull next. As their game ran its course and more and more things went the standards route, what's next?

Parsing user agent strings = bad.

[danhuby]

I've been developing web applications full time since 1996 and I've never once had to resort to browser detection via user agent strings. It's just bad practice.

The fact that some people have been doing this has led to the very convoluted user agent strings we see today, rather than a simple description of the browser / rendering engine and version.

It's perfectly possible to write code that works cross-browser without having to detect browsers via user agent strings. The closest I've come to any sort of browser specific code is occasionally including IE specific CSS to work around IE bugs, but this included in an IE specific way and is ignored by other browsers.

A browser vendor should be able to put whatever they like in the user agent string, and if that breaks a web site or application, then so be it. It's the fault of the developer for making assumptions.

Bork Bork

[TheP4st]

Back in 2003 msn.com deliberately sent Opera a faulty style sheet that broke the page, in response and to make a point Opera released a Bork version of their browser that turned msn.com into Swedish Chef talk. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-984632.html

Karma is a Bitch.

Re:Bork Bork

[Anonymous Coward]

This affected all 17 Opera users, especially the 3 of those that actually went to MSN.com...

Re:Bork Bork

[TheP4st]

Wow... original, did you come up with that yourself?

Re:Bork Bork

[Kjella]

Back in 2003 msn.com deliberately sent Opera a faulty style sheet that broke the page, in response and to make a point Opera released a Bork version of their browser that turned msn.com into Swedish Chef talk. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-984632.html

Of course the actual story is that Opera had a bug which that style sheet worked around, when they fixed it in a new version the page looked broken because they still got the modified style sheet. So yes it was deliberate but not malicious, in fact someone had made extra effort to make it work on Opera however the PR opportunity was far too good for Opera to pass up. That's one problem with browser-based hacks, if you're not around to maintain them should you assume the next version of IE will be 100% standards compliant or that most the IE6 hacks would also be required for IE7. It wasn't as obvious as you'd think, to the clients it looked like your site was incredibly fragile when it broke horribly on any new browser version. Those were dark days, long before real standards compliance.

Re:Bork Bork

[Poingggg]

No, Opera did not have 'a bug which that style sheet worked around'. I am too lazy to find a link, but when Opera changed the user agent to 'IE' (or Firefox, I'm not sure) without changing the renderer or anything else, the pages rendered perfectly. So there was no bug in Opera, MS borked the stylesheet they served to Opera.

Not surprising

[DrXym]

Bad JS has code such as "if (document.all || /MSIE/.test(navigator.userAgent)) isIE = true;" or some variant thereof. So changing the user agent and also removing any IE specific extensions like document.all, CreateObject() etc would be a good way to force browsers down the other path which is presumably more browser agnostic. IE could implement a whitelist test which enables the cruft on intranets which absolutely refuse to work otherwise.

I suppose we have to be grateful for MS in doing this providing they're now supporting standards rather than half implementing them. Sites shouldn't be testing for Gecko or Webkit either though or they'll be creating a problem for themselves down the line just like the one with IE 6/7 now. They should be programatically testing the features they need and avoid what the browser engine is as much as possible.