UA string.

[David Hyatt]

On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at 05:06 PM, Dirk Mueller wrote:

> Right, and they see Gecko if they don't know KHTML. and they see
> Mozilla/5.0 (some use the 5 as switching between total-legacy and
> reasonable-new). What we want to totally avoid is being detected as
> Netscape 6.x, because a lot of rather important sites simply block this
> browser.

I'd be curious to see a list of sites that block Gecko.  Not one of the 
top 1500 sites on the Web blocks Gecko as far as I know, and if you're 
talking about banking sites, well, they'll block us for being Safari 
(and are well-aware of any UA games we try to play).

> I know that we can render better CSS-based webpages, but if a website
> doesn't provide such a variant, being detected as MS IE is the best 
> thing
> that can happen. In fact, many Konqueror users prefer Konqueror over 
> Mozilla
> is because it allows them to browse rather IE centric web sites more 
> or less
> flawlessly, compared to Mozilla. We support document.all for example, 
> and

One idea regarding document.all is to support it conditionally 
depending on your UA string.  That way if your UA string is an 
MSIE-style string, document.all will work, but if you want to spoof as 
Gecko, you can then turn document.all off.

Then a UA-based exception list that spoofed as MSIE would automatically 
start using document.all as well.

I much prefer claiming to match Gecko by default and then automatically 
spoofing based off an exception list for those sites that only work 
with WinIE.

Unless we lie about our platform, if we put a word like "compatible" in 
our UA string, we are detected as Mac IE and not WinIE, and that can 
give us real headaches with Web sites (that you probably haven't had to 
worry about).

Anyway, I think the key thing to take away from this discussion is that 
we should include something in our UA strings that allows someone to 
easily detect a KHTML-based browser.  The rest of our strings (and our 
philosophies regarding default emulation of WinIE vs. Mozilla) may 
differ, but we should make it so there's an easy check that recognizes 
both Konq and Safari.

dave