Safari 3.1.1 and IE 6 User Agent

[gw1500se]

Safari v3 has made great improvements in its user agent for IE but seem to still have a ways to go. Can someone tell me what Apple’s intention is with respect to these user agents? Specifically I am wondering what kind of support Apple is providing for it. I have a couple of web sites that do not render correctly with the IE user agents. Does Apple want these kinds of bugs reported and if so, where? TIA.

[gw1500se]

Thanks for the reply. Interesting and disappointing at the same time. However, it seems that there are differences in the way Safari renders web sites based on user agent setting (at least IE). I have sites that do not complain about Safari but render incorrectly until the user agent is changed to IE. The sites then render correctly. I suppose they could be checking the agent and when they see Safari or Firefox just do the wrong thing but it seems too coincidental. How can I find out for sure?

[khiltd]

The ability to switch user agents is provided by different browser vendors primarily to allow their users to bypass the overzealous restrictions overseas contractors (who typically only test in IE) cook up to keep them from looking at their bank accounts and what have you. There is absolutely no reason for an end user to change it unless they are being blocked from accessing a specific site that fails to recognize the string that Safari broadcasts by default. It’s also useful for developer testing, but that’s clearly not the case here.

Changing the user agent does not turn Safari into IE, it just changes the way it identifies itself to the remote host. If you’re seeing broken layouts after switching it’s because IE requires tons of ridiculously complicated special-case hacks to get it to render/execute anything properly and you’re now asking for that code rather than the standards compliant version that works in every other browser in the world. This is not a bug, this is you doing something that didn’t need to be done in the first place. Switch it back, disable the Develop menu and run IE if you want to see how something looks in IE. Alternatively, there’s http://litmusapp.com

[gw1500se]

Thanks for the information. We have web sites that our business depends on that produce IE dependent web pages (those people should be banished from web development). We currently have a Citrix server the users go to under those circumstances but we are trying to eliminate it. This is going to be a tough nut to crack.

[gw1500se]

Thanks for the lead. I’ll take a look at it. It might be a life saver.

[gw1500se]

Oops! It appears ie4osx requires Wine and does not work on PPCs.

[khiltd]

If you need to spoof the user agent for specific sites but not others then you can configure Privoxy to do just that. OmniWeb can do it as well, but only if each user sets it up that way.

[gw1500se]

Thanks but it is more then just spoofing. It has to emulate IE. These developers that write IE specific web sites need to be hung by their thumbs.

[Author]

Posts