On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 10:21:38AM -0600, Brady Hegberg wrote:
> I recently emailed the USBanks online people because they don't support 
> Mozilla.  I'm guessing they detect the browser and if it's anything other 
> than Netscape or IE they give you a message saying your browser isn't 
> supported.  I can understand why they'd want to be careful but now that 
> Mozilla has built-in SSL it seems like it would be just a matter of saying 
> - "Use with other browsers at your own risk..."

SSL has nothing to do with it - you can tell apache that certain URIs are
only accessible using SSL and I'm sure that IIS has a similar capability, so
you can easily deny non-SSL connections without having to look at the
user-agent.

Pretty much every case I've seen where user-agent is checked, it's been
because the web site's developer has wanted to include the freaky-neato-cool-
effect-of-the-day, but it has to be done slightly differently under MSIE than
Netscape, so he codes it for each of them and refuses to deal with you if he
can't figure out how to make your browser play 1812 Overture and shake the
text in time with the cannons.  Or he's so used to doing that sort of thing
that he automatically checks the user-agent and rejects "non-standard"
browsers out of habit, even if he's serving up plain text and won't use the
browser information for anything other than telling people to go away.

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and at home. - SGI job posting
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