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The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

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Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#11
post #5

Anyone know what the IE11 update User Agent actually is, merely out of curiosity?

Sadly, it's complicated.

Read more here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2013/09/21/inter...

But the default is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#12
post #5

Anyone know what the IE11 update User Agent actually is, merely out of curiosity?

All the different IE11 user agents can be found on this msdn page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh869301%28v=vs.8...

According to the article, they added "like Gecko" onto the ends of them.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#13
Poor Windows Phone team.

This is a symptom of the ecosystem's indifference to the windows phone platform.

Browser vendors implementing hacks to trick web apps into presenting the right content because web developers have learned that they can't rely on the browser to render content properly.

I think there's a lesson in here about treating your ecosystem right.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#14
Edit: The previous title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly"

Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. As usual, it's the web developers fault for not updating their CSS prefixes.

http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor

Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft have been complaining about this and Opera had already implemented support for the webkit prefixes(before switching to webkit/Blink entirely) and Firefox-OS will probably follow.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#15
post #6

And the title will be changed by mods in 3...2..1... even though I think it's the more appropriate/non-misleading one.

The title is almost always changed if the post's title is different from the submission's title. There usually isn't a good reason to editorialize the title when submitting to HN, unless the title is something like a "Show HN." For anyone seeing this comment after the title has been changed, OP's title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly"

> For anyone seeing this comment after the title has been changed, OP's title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly"

editorializing or not, i prefer the less vague title. serves as a great tldr;

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#16
post #5

Anyone know what the IE11 update User Agent actually is, merely out of curiosity?

Before the update:

Mozila/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 625) like Gecko

After the update:

Mozila/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 625) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537

---

Sounds pretty desperate. But this is Microsoft with Windows Phone, so, no surprises here...

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#17
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title is almost always changed if the post's title is different from the submission's title. There usually isn't a good reason to editorialize the title when submitting to HN, unless the title is something like a "Show HN." For anyone seeing this comment after the title has been changed, OP's title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly"

> For anyone seeing this comment after the title has been changed, OP's title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly" editorializing or not, i prefer the less vague title. serves as a great tldr;

The HN guidelines clearly state to use the original title, though.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#18

Isn't this basically the state of the User Agent strings across all browsers? The strings are a messy combination of different browsers, versions and rendering engines.

Yes. The more things change, the more they stay the same: http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#19

Edit: The previous title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly" Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. As usual, it's the web developers fault for not updating their CSS prefixes. http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft have been complaining about this and Opera had already implemented support for th…

I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need. Why should we be developing to the lowest common denominator?

I think we should also watch out for link-bait SEO headlines such as "Why Webkit is the New IE6 (The Trap of Vendor Prefixes)"...

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