Today’s Opera weekly builds introduce a feature that I’ve been waiting for.
One problem that Opera has always had is with browser sniffers (actually “User Agent” sniffers). I’ve written about this before, but the short version is that some sites look at your browser’s user agent string and tell you what you can or cannot do based on the user agent string.
For a long time, Opera would sort of pretend to be Internet Explorer. Its user-agent string looked like this:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Mac_PowerPC; en) Opera 9.10
If you know how to read user agent strings, you know that this is Opera pretending to be Internet Explorer which is sort of pretending to be Netscape (Mozilla). But those browser sniffers are crafty, they looked for the word “Opera” and if they found it, they would say “AHA! You’re not fooling us! You’re not really Internet Explorer! I’m going to give you a different (read: “Not as good”) version of the site.
Why did they do this? 99% of the time it is just stupidity and/or laziness. There was no reason to deny Opera access to the full version of the site, the site authors just said “We only support Internet Explorer”
The only way to fix this completely remove the word Opera from the user agent string. Opera calls this “masking” and Opera has had the ability to “Mask” as Internet Explorer for awhile now. And that worked fine to get you into those “Internet Explorer Only” sites.
As long as you use Windows.
If you use Linux/Unix/etc or a Mac, some sites would say “Hey! If you aren’t using Windows, then you must not really be using Internet Explorer!!”
The only way to fix that is to pretend that you are A) using Internet Explorer and B) using Windows.
Opera will now do that.
Made IE ID string spoof as Windows on Linux/UNIX and Mac
So when I now “Mask as Internet Explorer” on my Mac, here is what my User Agent string will look like:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en)
Note you should checkout the for the latest builds.