Well, just as the title says.
You know, some of the “alternative” browsers tend to suffer from an identity crisis. They offer the option of masquerading as a different browser in their USER AGENT string.
Well, they only SAY they are a different browser, but they aren’t. They don’t behave like the browser they claim to be.
I use IE for all my browsing needs. I use Firefox, Netscape and Opera for test purposes only.
So it was that I had set Opera to masquerade as Mozilla, and forgot all about it.
To my great horror I visited one of my sites using Opera and Yikes! The display was all out of kilter, really messed up. Everything was showing up fine in IE, Firefox, Netscape. Just not in Opera.
So I’m looking at my code and the css. I had a patch in the css specific for Opera. My source code tests the browser and picks the proper style that includes the patch for Opera if it is Opera. This style was not being selected, the patch was nowhere to be seen. I was stumped!
Then I had a flash of Opera’s capability to identify as a different user agent and checked that and sure enough I had told it to identify as Mozilla, so my detection script didn’t detect Opera either.
Now obviously I have a flaw in my detection script because under the same circumstances Statcounter does pick it up still as Opera … so I have some work to do on that yet.
But I can’t help thinking how utterly stupid and counter-productive such a browser option is. Why in heavens’ name? Especially when the browser obviously does not behave exactly the same as the one it’s pretending to be in the user agent string. Grrrr……
