IE UA String Fun

So, after reading the IE blog post about the new UA string to be used in IE9 and the general rejection by many in the web development community I thought I would have a little fun trying out a version of the string to see who uses browser sniffing.

First, the default UA string:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Win64; x64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1)

For comparison, the new one one from the blog post:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)

And the one I thought would be fun to try:

Trident/5.0 (MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64;)

I thought I would try it on the following few websites:

	Default UA	IE9 UA	Trident UA
google.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
bing.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
wolframalpha.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
yahoo.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
msn.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
microsoft.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
apple.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
gmail.com	Looks good	Looks broken	Looks broken
ymail.com	Looks good	Not supported, won’t load.	Not supported, won’t load.
hotmail.com	Looks good	Looks good, but can’t read emails.	Looks good, but can’t read emails.
linkedin.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
facebook.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good. no chat though.
youtube.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
reader.goolge.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
maps.bing.com	Looks good	Warning page only	Warning page only
maps.google.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
maps.yahoo.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
mint.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
shkyrockett.blogspot.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good

 

First I created three instances of IE8 and set the UA strings for each using UAPick to change the string and the website http://www.enhanceie.com/ua.aspx so I could tell if the string had been changed.

I then duplicated the tabs in each browser instance to see if the tabs would keep the same UA string which they did. I kept the first tabs open for reference to which string was being used, then visited the different web sites in turn to see the results.

I’m curious what other sites break with these UA strings. But the fun one would be:

Trident/5.0 (MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; SLCC2; Made You Look!)