[9679] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Microsoft IE -- it just gets better and better
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (M. Hedlund)
Fri Jan 26 20:09:26 1996
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 16:59:30 -0800 (PST)
From: "M. Hedlund" <hedlund@best.com>
To: www-talk@w3.org
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Well, we were all amused when Microsoft trained its Internet Explorer
browser to identify itself as
Mozilla/1.21 (compatible; MSIE 2.0B; [platform])
Yup, that was a laugh riot. Then Microsoft released Internet Explorer
for Mac, and made it available at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/mac/macdl.htm
(get it? 'windows/ie/mac'?) and that was hysterical. But take a look at
the "Options..." window for Mac Internet Explorer, and you'll see where
it gets better.
Mac IE gives the user a choice of User-Agent strings. You can choose to
identify yourself as Internet Explorer (by which they still mean
Mozilla/1.21 (compatible; MSIE 2.0B; Mac_PowerPC)
!), Netscape 1.2 (
Mozilla/1.22(Macintosh; I; PowerPC)
), Netscape 2.0 (this one was on by default....*sigh*
Mozilla/2.0b3(Macintosh; I; PowerPC)
), or even a custom string that you enter! (I chose
I-am-not-netscape-i-am-internet-explorer/2.0B
.)
Aargh! Does IE implement _any_ of Netscape 2.0 features? It doesn't do
frames and it doesn't do server pushes and it doesn't do Java and there are
don't seem to be any plug-ins. Microsoft is trying to get _around_
user-agent negotiation by identifying itself as the most featureful
browser, but they haven't added the features which make user-agent
negotiation desirable at all (ugly and backwards as it is). So instead,
they're giving their users data their browser can't render. Nice work!
If Microsoft feels they need to resort to this, the least they could do
is send someone to the content negotiation subgroup of the HTTP working
group. Netscape has.
Marc Hedlund <hedlund@best.com>, <marc@organic.com>
