Scottish Power disconnects Linux users (Register)

Posted Oct 19, 2002 0:58 UTC (Sat) by bchapman26 (guest, #4565)
Parent article: Scottish Power disconnects Linux users (Register)

Konqueror allows you to change the User Agent of the browser to trick web pages into thinking you are using IE on Windows.

Konqueror (and Mozilla) useragent adjustment.

Posted Oct 19, 2002 6:10 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

The problem with the useragent adjustment in both Konqueror and Mozilla (yes, Mozilla has an addon that makes it as easy to change as with Konqueror) is that it ONLY sets the HTTP header Useragent string. It doesn't adjust the value returned by the scripted versions. Thus, many sites that REALLY want to detect UA, simply require scripting, and use that function. The easy way around this is to use a personal proxy that both sets (or deletes) the UA header, AND reworks scripts using that functionality to return an arbitrary working value. Often, such scripts are entirely client-side anyway, so no values are returned to the server. The idea is that the proxy simply replaces any scripted calls to determine browser type and version with stub functions returning True/OK, so the script continues as desired. (The potential problem with that is that sitemasters may still draw the wrong conclusions about browser types, based on the URLs fetched, if their unmodified scripts only fetch those URLs from certain browsers. However, that's at least a further level of indirection.)