[Am-info] Budweiser: Use Microsoft software or bug off

[Roy Bixler]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 02:59:07PM -0800, Mitch Stone wrote:
> I may misunderstand how this works, but I thought the web server relied 
> on the browser to report its identity. This is selectable with Safari 
> (if the debug menu is turned on), so I can make it masquerade as any 
> one of several browsers and platforms. As I say, setting Safari to 
> report itself as IE on Windows nearly always blows right past the 
> "browser not supported" messages, but not in this case.

One of the fields the browser sends to the server is "user agent".
This is what you change when you instruct your browser to spoof.  The
server can also use some other methods to guess the browser, such as
Javascript code.  One example of this is to invoke a function which is
only available in Internet Explorer and, if it fails, go to your
"handle other browsers" code.  That code in turn may let Netscape on
Windows through but deny access to other browsers.

> Safari is based on the Konqueror engine, but I don't think it's 
> entirely accurate to call it a Linux port.

True.  Strictly speaking, it was written for the K Desktop
Environment.  KDE, in turn, was written for the QT GUI library.  The
QT GUI library is portable to a diverse set of platforms.  Konqueror,
KDE and QT work on quite a few varieties of Unix, so you're correct to
say that it's not Linux specific.  Linux is KDE's primary development
platform, so I use Linux as a shorthand for "Unix type of operating
system running X Windows."  However, I remember hearing once that
someone built KDE in Microsoft Windows just to prove that it could be
done.

R.