Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String • Hacker News Board

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#11

Post by claudius » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 3:51 PM UTC

RFC 2616[0] says in section 14.43 that user agents SHOULD send a User-Agent field. Is there any particular reason why it is still sensible to send such a field at all, rather than maybe something more generic like ‘Crawler’, ‘Graphical’ and ‘Terminal’ (to distinguish the three cases that might come to mind immediately)?

In other words, what benefit does a User-Agent field have nowadays when people are told to check for capabilities rather than products, apart from allowing fancy statistics which company currently has the long^Whighest bar in the user agent statistics?

[0] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#12

Post by talmand » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 3:53 PM UTC

Banduin wrote: post #6

zalew wrote: post #5

> Microsoft also included the command "Like Gecko" which instructs the website to send back the same version of the website as they would to Firefox seriously, who does that? 'msie5.0 mozilla', good times. 'like gecko' => msie trying to look like webkit, who tries to look like firefox. yeah, makes perfect sense. could anyone give an example of a modern application that checks against the user agent string?

Chrome? > Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.40 Safari/537.31

I'm thinking he meant more in terms of who builds a website that respects the "like Gecko" in the UA string as UA sniffing has been considered a sub par method for a while now.

I agree with "who does that" because I've never done UA sniffing so I had to look up the term "like Gecko" to even understand the context. As someone else has pointed out, that's for browsers that are not using the Gecko rendering engine. So essentially, everyone is trying to be "like Gecko" in one way or another.

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#13

Post by daleharvey » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 3:54 PM UTC

zalew wrote: post #9

Banduin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome? > Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.40 Safari/537.31

I meant 'who does check that user agent', edited to clarify.

A lot of people, on Firefox OS we have a blacklist of sites we have to send Android like user agents to so we are served mobile friendly content: https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/build/ua-ove...

Its a sad situation.

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#14

Post by tzaman » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 3:54 PM UTC

Dear Microsoft,

other browser vendors release new versions on a regular basis, regardless of the operating system number. This enables browser-related technologies to evolve at a more rapid pace. So please do us all a favor and stop locking major IE releases to Windows versions and just try to imitate what others do. We won't judge you for copying, promise.

Sincerely, Web developers

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#15

Post by Zirro » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 3:56 PM UTC

Banduin wrote: post #6

zalew wrote: post #5

> Microsoft also included the command "Like Gecko" which instructs the website to send back the same version of the website as they would to Firefox seriously, who does that? 'msie5.0 mozilla', good times. 'like gecko' => msie trying to look like webkit, who tries to look like firefox. yeah, makes perfect sense. could anyone give an example of a modern application that checks against the user agent string?

Chrome? > Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.40 Safari/537.31

For those who wonder how we ended up with such a mess of a user-agent string, this one is a classic: http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#16

Post by danielnr » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 3:57 PM UTC

zalew wrote: post #5

> Microsoft also included the command "Like Gecko" which instructs the website to send back the same version of the website as they would to Firefox seriously, who does that? 'msie5.0 mozilla', good times. 'like gecko' => msie trying to look like webkit, who tries to look like firefox. yeah, makes perfect sense. could anyone give an example of a modern application that checks against the user agent string?

I haven't seen web servers send back different pages for non-Mozilla browsers since Mozilla browsers were selectively served frames[0], which is why most User-Agent strings contain "Mozilla". Despite whether this is a good idea or not, it's nostalgically entertaining to see history repeat itself like this.

[0] http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#17

Post by Shish2k » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 4:00 PM UTC

April 1st already? I know I'm terrible at keeping track of time, but I could've sworn we were still about a week away x_x

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#18

Post by cooldeal » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 4:00 PM UTC

tzaman wrote: post #14

Dear Microsoft, other browser vendors release new versions on a regular basis, regardless of the operating system number. This enables browser-related technologies to evolve at a more rapid pace. So please do us all a favor and stop locking major IE releases to Windows versions and just try to imitate what others do. We won't judge you for copying, promise. Sincerely, Web developers

Aren't they making releases faster with IE11 compared to earlier cycles of taking years between versions? IE10 is from 5 or 6 months ago.

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#19

Post by Millennium » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 4:02 PM UTC

mrspeaker wrote: post #8

xixora1 wrote: post #3

Check what @ppk says: http://mobilism.nl/blog/2013/03/ie11-to-disguise-itself

For the non-clickers: It's Webkit, not Firefox that it will be disguising itself as: "The 'like Gecko' string has been part of most WebKit-browser UA strings from time immemorial, but has never been used by Firefox, which instead uses 'Gecko'".

The first versions of Safari had "like Gecko," so its WebKit heritage is long indeed. Maybe MSIE should use "sort of like Gecko" instead?

Re: Testers Say IE11 Includes 'Like Gecko' in User Agent String

#20

Post by jgraham » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 4:04 PM UTC

daleharvey wrote: post #13

zalew wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant 'who does check that user agent', edited to clarify.

A lot of people, on Firefox OS we have a blacklist of sites we have to send Android like user agents to so we are served mobile friendly content: https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/build/ua-ove... Its a sad situation.