Since this is a relevant thread in this
Evangelism article, I'll point out
that changing your user agent string
to match IE's is not a good thing.
Why ? Simple:
The sites monitoring their Web logs will add your accesses to their "%age
of users running IE", distorting IE"s
market share. This in turn will further
convince them that IE is "the only
browser we're going to support" and you
can bet that means IE-only proprietary
extensions too.
It's a good thing that the agent-changing pref is only in your
prefs file (which <1% of end-users will
ever hand-edit) and doesn't have a UI.
It's a bad mistake that Opera made for
example - you can pick between several
user agents in their UI (any bets that
a lot of users fake Opera as IE to get
into browser-sniffing sites ?) and this
hinders Opera's visibility no end (same
"oh that's IE, let's add it to IE's
market share" problem I mentioned above).
Personally, I'd be in favour of
pulling the Mozilla option from
the prefs file too and also obfuscating
the string in the binary to stop
people with binary editors changing it
(yes, you could get the source, change
it and re-compile, but that's a huge
task for users). We need to make sure
that Mozilla (and NS 6.X) are properly
ID'ed in Web site logs.
If a site
doesn't support Mozilla/NS 6.X,
e-mail them and tell them you'll take
your business elsewhere unless they do. If you can fake Mozilla to look like
IE and get into the site, then you're
far less likely to complain to the
Webmaster, IMHO (and by the time they
throw in the IE-only extensions, it'll
be too late to complain !).
Evangelism Update