It seems Opera is not the only web browser that has to resort to UA spoofing in order to get around browser sniffing. Google recently released a patch that changes the Chrome user agent string when browsing Microsoft’s Hotmail site. From the official changelog:
While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we’re deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com.
Omar Shahine, Lead Program Manager on the Hotmail Front Door team, didn’t take too kindly to that, and had this to say (emphasis is mine):
You think that Hotmail is a Web page and you expect a service with hundreds of millions of users and thousands of servers to stop what it’s doing, fix a bug for a browser that the majority of its customers do not use, and spin up an out-of-band release?
Hey, Google! It’s not much fun being on the other side of it, is it?
(Via CNET)
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I’ve had certain websites only allow me to use Opera if I made it think it was IE. I decided to use other websites because I never liked that on statistics it came up IE. How’s Opera supposed to get people to properly code pages if they think they only have to code them for lazy browsers that don’t render properly?
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is it just me or digg’s not working on this page? what are they sniffing?
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Looks like Microsoft has some fixing to do
for hotmail:
Errors found while checking this document as XHTML 1.0 Strict!Result: 171 Errors, 41 warning(s)
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Microsoft deserves a one big slap. Google should now go and break IE6 in GMail because the majority of users don’t use it (by their statistics which they wouldn’t publish of course).
Then MS will suck it!
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“Cutts responded, in effect, that Google knows plenty about running big Web sites, thank you very much.”
That’s a funny comment considering Google’s constant breakage of Opera on their sites.
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For a number of years I have had to change my identity to Netscape to get into the Royal Opera House website ( http://www.roh.org.uk ). This has resulted in e-mails to the webmaster each time. Recently progress was made, and the Royal Opera House, at last, is Opera friendly. Complaining can get results.
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Gotta love the irony!
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Steve Barker great job on opening the web
One email every few months
I also helped open 2 sites and a few others with a few emails to the web masters
I now have this as my signature on all my emails:
Why Open the Web?
Despite the connecting purpose of the Web, it is not entirely open to all of its users. When used correctly, HTML documents can be displayed across platforms and devices. However, many devices are excluded access to Web content.
http://my.opera.com/community/openweb/info/
Alexei have you had any site block you because you use Flock?
ps Flock 2.0.3 is out
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kftgr: I have noticed this submission error, too. I have reported it as a bug to Digg.
Edit: Digg support was very quick to fix the bug! You may submit now.