Comments on: User Agent Fun With Opera

By: dummy

dummy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:28:51 +0000

ua sniffing is dumb test with js for features supported only by the browser you are targeting. if they have js disabled and your css is so lame you can’t target specific browsers with it, then you have no place pretending your a real web dev

ua sniffing is LAME ALWAYS it’s NEVER a good idea (unless you serve special content to google… *cough*)

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:54:48 +0000

Props to the commentors for picking up on the fact that the info in this article is dated. It had me going for awhile as my website stats clearly pick up opera users. I have Opera 9 and don’t think the browser still allows the user to spoof another type of browser (or at least I could not figure out how to use that capability). To the author, could of happened to anybody as you relied on the company’s own web site. One would think they would update that info given in the knowledge base or at least note that it only applies to older versions.

By: Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:10:10 +0000

There’s lots of fun out there regarding UA strings, and the first browser to impersonate a different one was actually MSIE itself by telling it would be “Mozilla/x.xx (compatible; …)” as “Mozilla/x.xx” was (supposed to be) the identifier for Netscape.
The bad thing is that sometime sppofing or impersonating a different browser is needed for your browser not to be shut out (!) of some websites, which Camino and SeaMonkey for example felt or feel quite strongly. See my posts about the topic on http://home.kairo.at/?d=w&i=1&m=v&f.tags=UA+String for some more on those dirty things.

By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:58:54 +0000

Aha, thanks for the “history lesson”. And while I disagree that user-agent sniffing is *never* a good idea, I concur that its legitimate use cases are very, very small and, as a rule of thumb, most UA sniffing that’s currently present on the web is done for none of the “good reasons” I am mentioning in the article.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:43:51 +0000

The reason that Opera used to pretend to be IE is because back in the olden days many used to sniff user-agent strings and either not display for any non-IE browser or provide a crippled version “optimised” for non-IE browsers (i.e. Netscape 4). It’s easy to forget that Opera faked its user-string long, long before Firefox even existed, and has origins in when every other browser was languishing so far behind IE to be meaningless, and Opera was the main alternative and was a commercial browser in a distant 2nd.

Even today I’d argue relying on user-agent sniffing for /anything/ is generally a bad idea.

By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:34:51 +0000

Thanks for your comment. That it is not the default *anymore* was what I guessed, though their — apparently outdated — knowledge base article convinced me otherwise.

Thus, I added some clarifications to the article, now that I am sure my initial guess was correct.

By: Eric Perdue

Eric Perdue — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:18:36 +0000

Perhaps you shouldn’t trust everything they say in the web. That article you linked is old (after all, it lists only Opera 6 and 7 as the current yet unreleased version is 10).
Operas default user agent string in linux is: Opera/10.00 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; Edition Turbo; en) Presto/2.2.0

So there is no even mention of Mozilla. Much more simpler and cleaner than example the Firefox string…

Faint notion of irony is that somebody blogs about working with user agents and then doesn’t even apparently know what are the default user agents for different browsers…