radar (imported) wrote: Fri Jul 02, 2004 3:37 pm Hi Tomas, and thanks for the support. I really wasn't trying to be difficult about the change, and you pointed that out quite nicely, and explained it much better than I ever could.

But please tell me: How do I spoof the client ID? Is that done as a registry tweak?

Thanks, Radar.

To spoof the client's ID on three of my browsers it's right there in the Preferences/Options for the browser, for the other two it requires me to re-write a line or two in one of their library files. How to do it on an MS Windows machine is beyond my knowledge as I've never once used a machine running MS Windows (I've used UNIX since 1982 and added Mac's in 1986).

I believe the Mozilla pages have some stuff on that, and I know I've seen it in both the Mozilla Camino and Safari discussion forums.

Good luck trying it!

Take care,

Tom

P.S. There is arguement in the forums about doing this since it distorts the browser use statistics seen by the rest of the world.

If one spoofs, for example, "Apple Safari" to say that it's MSIE on an MS Windows machine (which is one of it's "Debug" options) so that one can view pages who's designer's have hosed them for anytning not "MSIE on MSW", the stats show more MSIE and MSW machines out there and fewer Apple Macs even though the Macs using Safari are there.

Some argue that this defeats the whole thing and nothing will ever change so long as we pretend to be 'MSIE on MSW' machines. Others say "Yeah, we know that but we have to use that %#!*!*# page."

My mum's machine is a Mac I gave her, but it pretends to be an MS Windows machine running MSIE so she can talk to her bank and the power company. She doesn't even know it's doing this, just that I did something to make it work. *sigh* (Hey, she's 78 and I'm impressed that she's as computer savvy as she is.)

Myself, I do ID correctly as much as possible, and only fake it when I absolutely have to. When a page is set up to treat 'MSIE on MSW' in a preferential way, and it's a commercial page or one that I seriously feel shouldn't, I DO let them know, and try to get change. Most are just so fscking unaware it is amazing.

If they can't or won't change I have two choices: 1) Don't patronize their business and let them know why or, if I HAVE to use their service, 2) fake that I'm what they like but let them know I'm not and don't like their attitude.

My last opponent was the City of Tacoma and their IT department got enough flack from the political types I poked with a sharp stick that they put a small team on making damned sure their pages followed W3C standards and would work with almost anything.

T

talula wrote: Fri Jul 02, 2004 2:11 pm Sure Thomas,

Last month's stats go as follows:

IE 87.7%

Netscape 7.1%

Opera 1.3%

Safari 1%

Webtv .2%

Konqueror .1%

A pile of PDA browsers, Lynx, etc.

Where does my AOL 8.0 fit into those statistics?

Talula,

Just one little thing that I noticed. On the main page there was a not very friendly message "The archive does not recognise you". I went to the message board so that I could log in again and found that I was actually still logged in.

LOL