Testers Say IE 11 Can Impersonate Firefox Via User Agent String 252
Billly Gates writes "With the new leaked videos and screenshots of Windows Blue released, IE 11 is also included. IE 10 just came out weeks ago for Windows 7 users and Microsoft is more determined than ever to prevent IE from becoming irrelevant as Firefox and Chrome scream past it by also including a faster release schedule. A few beta testers reported that IE 11 changed its user agent string from MSIE to IE with the 'like gecko' command included. Microsoft may be doing this to stop web developers stop feeding broken IE 6-8 code and refusing to serve HTML 5/CSS 3 whenever it detects MSIE in its user agent string. Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied to ancient and specific version of IE. Will this cause more hours of work for web developers? Or does IE10+ really act like Chrome or Firefox and this will finally end the hell of custom CSS tricks?"
Headline and Summary Mismatch (Score:5, Informative)
The headline isn't even discussed in the summary.
However, it's obvious the standard ability of browsers to report a different user agent for dev and testing has been sensationalized here just for click generation.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Yes that is all they have to do and surprise, surprise, they do it:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575 [microsoft.com]
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Informative)
If someone has a client that can't render a standard page, then that's their problem and we should have left them to it - eventually they would have complained to the relevant person and their browser would become closer to the standard.
Are you new here? You may not remember the days when this mess all started. IE was king and you *had* to work around it. You couldn't just let it be "their problem" and "left them to it". That's so "counter-productive, I can't even begin to explain it". These customers (sheep running IE) would come to *you* in droves asking why they couldn't view your website. And your response was going to be "because IE doesn't display my standards-compliant page"? Wow...no...that doesn't work.
Nowadays, things are clearly different. Which is great. But to suggest developers should have never used the user-agent tag to distinguish browser differences is ludicrous.
Re:Bork Bork (Score:4, Informative)
Back in 2003 msn.com deliberately sent Opera a faulty style sheet that broke the page, in response and to make a point Opera released a Bork version of their browser that turned msn.com into Swedish Chef talk. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-984632.html [cnet.com]
Of course the actual story is that Opera had a bug which that style sheet worked around, when they fixed it in a new version the page looked broken because they still got the modified style sheet. So yes it was deliberate but not malicious, in fact someone had made extra effort to make it work on Opera however the PR opportunity was far too good for Opera to pass up. That's one problem with browser-based hacks, if you're not around to maintain them should you assume the next version of IE will be 100% standards compliant or that most the IE6 hacks would also be required for IE7. It wasn't as obvious as you'd think, to the clients it looked like your site was incredibly fragile when it broke horribly on any new browser version. Those were dark days, long before real standards compliance.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Too lazy to follow the link?
It's a virtual machine, works perfectly fine on VirtualBox and thus on Linux and OSx.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
This makes the assumption that the money would be spent on something else when the true objective of the game is to hoard as much as possible.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Actually MS offer a compatibility mode in IE that runs the old IE6 engine in a sandbox. You can create a whitelist of sites thatwill auautomatically use it. No need for a VM.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Browsers and the World Wide Web in general didn't just suddenly appear one day, fully formed with a complete set of perfect specifications and standards. They evolved slowly over time. And while everything was evolving, and while everyone was trying to figure out exactly what those web standards should be, the rest of the world wasn't standing still. Billions of web pages were being created, based on whatever shitty browsers and standards existed at the time.
For a long time, it didn't matter what "standards" there were. Internet Explorer *WAS* the standard, because it was the only major browser -- there was no Firefox or Chrome -- and so that's how web pages were designed.
Exactly.
I used to work from 2002 to 2005 as a web developer for a company who mostly contracted to graphic designers. At the time they expected to things to work on IE5 (the Mac version of course). They did not really care about Firefox (although it did exist then, but with zero non-techy users).
I threw together god knows how many sites in the 2-3 years I worked at that company. All we did was offer the client a choice: If they wanted firefox support, they paid extra. Almost nobody bothered. We were a budget development house so our margins would not support the extra work of supporting all the IE hacks needed and the more W3C firefox unless the client paid extra. They all required the sites to work perfectly in IE though obviously.
I tried to make sites work in Firefox just out of a sense of professionalism on a few occasions but the problem is that then you appeared to have a far slower work rate than the rest of the team who took the IE only short cut they were told to by the technical manager. He was also a developer, director of the company and joint owner so he made an informed decision not to support anything other than IE from technical perspective and was able to see if you were ignoring it. If you ignored it that was fine, but you still had to keep up with the other devs simply by putting in overtime.
It only took other browser to get a market share above 5% - 10% for things other than IE5 / IE6 under Windows and suddenly clients were interested in supporting other browsers. In 2002 - 2004 though IE was so dominant that nobody cared about anything else in the real world as only geeks bothered to change their browser. Making things IE only remained common place in commercial web development right up to 2005 - 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers [wikipedia.org]
I remember having to spoof using IE under Linux in order to access my online banking (from HSBC) as they considered all other browser to be too insecure :)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Informative)