meagain wrote:
Why is the "user agent" still needed? Seriously, have html implementations diverged so much?
For reasons that have always escaped me, web designers nowadays prefer to write several versions of their code, each custom-tailored to one of their favorite (familiar) browsers, instead of writing one W3C-compliant version that works on all browsers. Then in order to make this needlessly cumbersome system work, they have to "sniff" the browser (ask it what it is) and then serve the appropriate version (if it's one of the approved browsers) or an error message (if it's not).
Then people like us who use one of the unapproved browsers are forced into various means of "spoofing" an approved browser (lying to the sniffer) so we don't get rejected. That's what this whole thread has been about. If you don't send a UA string, the website will not be able to identify you as an approved browser (silence is not an effective lie), and it will generate an error message instead of a page custom-tailored to the browser you pretend to be using.
-- War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left. -- Paul B. Gallagher _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
