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

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)?<p>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?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616" rel="nofollow">https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616</a>

Dear Microsoft,<p>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 <i>locking</i> major IE releases to Windows versions and just try to imitate what others do. We won't judge you for copying, promise.<p>Sincerely, Web developers

This actually seems like a really smart move on MS's part. I've seen far to many sites that have blanket conditionals for any msie browser, which will potentially disable supported HTML5 / CSS3 features in IE9 +

Check what @ppk says: <a href="http://mobilism.nl/blog/2013/03/ie11-to-disguise-itself" rel="nofollow">http://mobilism.nl/blog/2013/03/ie11-to-disguise-itself</a>

If companies are going to start messing with user agent strings again, can we please try to restore some sanity? How about "Internet Explorer 11.0" as a user agent? Would that be so hard?

&#62; 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<p>seriously, who does that? 'msie5.0 mozilla', good times. 'like gecko' =&#62; 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?

"&#62; 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"<p>This is a little misleading. "Like Gecko" is not used in the Firefox UA String. It just says Gecko. "Like Gecko" is a component of Webkit-based browsers. So IE is emulating Webkit emulating Firefox, and dries the "MS" of "MSEI" for their string, and going with just "IE".<p>via Peter Paul-Koch: "IE11 to disguise itself as WebKit (and not Firefox!)", <a href="http://mobilism.nl/blog/2013/03/ie11-to-disguise-itself" rel="nofollow">http://mobilism.nl/blog/2013/03/ie11-to-disguise-itself</a>

Wasn't it once that other browsers sent MSIE UA to look like IE? How times change.

Oh, wonderful, another quirks mode. The moment FF implements something that IE doesn't, we're right back into the shit.

This version of IE (11) comes from the leaked Windows Blue build 9364. What you might want to consider is how MS real world test IE11 without broadcasting the user agent. I'm guessing this 'beta' version is reporting itself as Firefox to disguise itself from server logs.

Because changing the user agent for this has worked to great effect before. /s

This is good. I just had to add a meta tag to force IE9 and IE10 into IE8 Standards Mode. This was a 5 year old site that was coded to work in IE6 that stopped working properly on IE9.

If you're checking versions and not features, you're doing it wrong.

I want to start by saying, this article needs a giant dose of grain-o-salt. The PS4 was leaked like how many times? And, we all know how that went.<p>However, As someone who is locked into an app that is tied to IE 6-7, I don't relish the idea of being forced to re-write some 50,000+ lines of legacy code.<p>This does however force our customers to seriously consider putting out an effort to redesign in the first place.

I misread this and got excited thinking IE was going to drop Trident in favor of Gecko, in the same way Opera is switching to Webkit.

We will pile hacks on top of hacks until the web is indistinguishable from a very drunk and very angry magician.

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