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IE11 no longer identifies itself

7 points by calebl ↗ HN
I haven't seen this picked up elsewhere, so I thought I'd point it out. In earlier Windows previews, IE11 had supposedly switched to using "IE 11.0" in the user agent string instead of "MSIE 11.0" in order to break most current browser detection and have sites deliver fully capable versions to the latest IEs. However, I just installed the Windows 8.1 preview, and IE11 actually gives me this as a User-Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Note the complete lack of "IE" or "MSIE"... if you really want to know that it's IE, you need to use the Trident string as the key indicator, I'd say, and then the "rv:" to capture the browser version.

Also, all the other major browsers (Chrome, FF, Opera) don't pick up NT 6.3 (Windows 8.1 OS) in the preview... they're all showing 6.2, while IE shows 6.3.

No idea if that's the ultimate agent that will go out with the full release of 8.1, obviously.

4 comments

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electrichead
I don't think it is a big loss but an interesting user agent string nonetheless.
midnitewarrior
User Agent strings are an archaic form of identity. In the case of Microsoft, much of the web tries to put IE off in its own corner due to its history of incompatibilities. The general answer has been to detect "MS" or "MSIE" and throw it a less capable site, or even worse, simply refuse to serve a functional site.

If Microsoft want's IE11 to be taken seriously, I think they've played their cards properly, as this should bypass existing IE filters. It somewhat feels like "deception" (Microsoft trying to fool the Web), but in their defense, the IE filters out there are not discerning enough -- somebody couldn't get their site to work in IE8, so they blocked ALL IE. There's no way Microsoft can combat this other than this tactic.

Now, if IE11 fails to deliver, I think they will only make the situation worse, as people will start building Trident filters.

electrichead
I think most people use conditional comments for IE and don't bother with user agent strings. I do, anyway.
dstorey
Many people use conditional comments, but I wouldn’t go as far as saying most use them. There are tons of browser sniffing scripts out there on the web. I used to have to deal with them all the time when doing web site compatibility for Opera. They wouldn’t have made this change if they didn’t need to.

It is the same situation with hiding support for things like document.all, so they avoid the sniffers that do: if (document.all) { ie = true; } then use the ie variable to give those browsers the legacy IE code path.