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Re: Oh, great! this is just what we need...

for

From: Timothy J. Luoma
Date: Oct 11, 2002 11:47AM

John Foliot - bytown internet wrote:

> it's chameleon like behaviour (I don't see being able to spoof itself
> as something else or as declaring itself as Opera as a feature, but
> an annoyance).

While I don't mind anyone criticizing Opera (and I have my complaints
to), I find this particular note bothersome... not directing this at
John, but in general, because people criticize Opera for this a lot, and
to me it makes no sense.

There's this extremely common practice called 'browser sniffing' and if
you aren't the browser that 'they' want you to be, then 'they' keep you
from their site, even if it will work fine.

For example, Opera does Hotmail just fine. But if I ID = Opera, I have
to look at a screen EVERY TIME I login that gives me 4 lines of 'Your
browser may not be able to handle this site' blah blah blah.

If I ID as IE, then it lets me right in.

Web designers are to blame for this... designers who wrote sites for
specific browsers and used JavaScript to gatekeep.

Do you use Internet Explorer? Do you realize that it pretends to be
Mozilla, err, Netscape? Don't believe me? Go to
http://tntluoma.com/php/ua.php with IE and tell me what you see... the
first word will probably be something like "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible)"

IE started doing that after web designers started making sites that
would only work in Netscape... but by then people had already started
sniffing browsers, and IE didn't want to be left out, so they pretended
to be Netscape.

Now sites are checking for MSIE because some sites will NOT let you in
unless you are IE.

So Opera pretends to be IE. Otherwise its customers would not be able
to access many sites, including online banking sites. And that does not
make people happy.

It's not Opera's fault that web designers have created this situation,
they are just trying to deal with the reality of life on the web.

TjL

ps -- I wrote about this at
http://tntluoma.com/opera/lover/day15-instant/ which might give some
more information for those who aren't bored stiff by now.

--
The homepage is the place where,
when you have to go there,
you have a lot to take in.
(With apologies to Frost.)



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