"Apple's Safari is making its way to the Windows platform with the serious intention of making a dent in the market. As brilliant as the people are at Apple, I can't help but laugh at their, to put it politely, delusion. Before I ramble on too much, here are my five reasons why Safari will fail on the Windows platform." My take: Safari on Windows isn't here to take over the Windows browsing market. It's here for the iPhone.
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Member since:2007-02-22
Opera still defaults to identifying itself as IE6 running on WinXp regardless of whether you run it on *nix or Windows, so Browser ID generated statistics don't tell the whole Opera story.
I think Opera began identifying as Opera by default in version 8.0. It even identifies itself without the usual mess of compatibility crud. For instance, my user agent is:
Opera/9.21 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
It wouldn't be much different if I was on my SuSE partition, something along the lines of:
Opera/9.21 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)
I commend Opera Software on this. It's about time we did away with the "like Gecko", "Mozilla compatible" user agent thing. If Opera can function just fine without it, I think all browsers could; if not, they could change user agents on a case-by-case basis until virtually no sites require user-agent compatibility strings. Hell, I don't think there are that many left nowadays, anyway, so it wouldn't hurt to speed up the process a bit.
That being said, you very well could be right--Opera may be spoofing user agents on a case-by-case basis. I'm not certain of the inner-workings of Opera's browser.js file. All I know is it's an automatically updated collection of rendering exceptions and fixes for non-compliant sites that don't play nice with Opera. Opera could be using it to spoof user agents.
But I don't think it'd do spoofing on a majority of sites, though, and us regular ole Opera users are still unfortunately few and far between. I think Opera Mini has a higher "market share" than their desktop browser.
Member since:
2005-07-02
Opera still defaults to identifying itself as IE6 running on WinXp regardless of whether you run it on *nix or Windows, so Browser ID generated statistics don't tell the whole Opera story. As long as Opera continues to masquerade there browser ID**, the only way that we can get any accurate idea of Opera's use is from pageviews on the Opera default search page and from download numbers from Opera servers.
**which they first started doing back in 2001 due to MS messing with stylesheets on pages when the site detected an Opera browser http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/18/2222204