Comments on: User-agent-enhanced Websites http://cubist.cs.washington.edu/Security/2008/02/10/user-agent-enhanced-websites/ Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:34:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Ole Hansen http://cubist.cs.washington.edu/Security/2008/02/10/user-agent-enhanced-websites/#comment-4426 Ole Hansen Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:03:20 +0000 http://cubist.cs.washington.edu/Security/2008/02/10/user-agent-enhanced-websites/#comment-4426 In the case of experts-exchange, I don't think they actually use the user agent string for this. Try following your own link and scroll all the way to the bottom. In the case of experts-exchange, I don’t think they actually use the user agent string for this. Try following your own link and scroll all the way to the bottom.

]]> By: cbhacking http://cubist.cs.washington.edu/Security/2008/02/10/user-agent-enhanced-websites/#comment-604 cbhacking Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:53:16 +0000 http://cubist.cs.washington.edu/Security/2008/02/10/user-agent-enhanced-websites/#comment-604 Side note: Konqueror and Opera also support User-agent spoofing. I don't know about Safari, however. In addition to getting around restrictions by pretending to be a web crawler, user-agent spoofing can be used to handle web sites that present different HTML to different browsers. For example. some browsers such as Konqueror and Opera have very capable rendering engines (better than the Gecko engine used by current versions of Firefox, in many cases) but because their user-agents are unknown they get fed very basic code by some sites. User-agent spoofing often allows this to be worked around, for example, Konqueror by default identifies itself as Firefox when visiting Gmail, to avoid being redirected to the basic HTML view. This is also useful when a browser (usually IE) is intentionally given reduced-functionality code. A great many sites that had to be "dumbed down" for IE6 work fine in IE7, but generally all that the server looks for is the "MSIE" substring in the user agent. Using a plug-in (such as IE7Pro), it's possible to work around these and get the full site. Side note: Konqueror and Opera also support User-agent spoofing. I don’t know about Safari, however.

In addition to getting around restrictions by pretending to be a web crawler, user-agent spoofing can be used to handle web sites that present different HTML to different browsers. For example. some browsers such as Konqueror and Opera have very capable rendering engines (better than the Gecko engine used by current versions of Firefox, in many cases) but because their user-agents are unknown they get fed very basic code by some sites. User-agent spoofing often allows this to be worked around, for example, Konqueror by default identifies itself as Firefox when visiting Gmail, to avoid being redirected to the basic HTML view.

This is also useful when a browser (usually IE) is intentionally given reduced-functionality code. A great many sites that had to be “dumbed down” for IE6 work fine in IE7, but generally all that the server looks for is the “MSIE” substring in the user agent. Using a plug-in (such as IE7Pro), it’s possible to work around these and get the full site.

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