And if you’re going to do that, you go for the browser that has the largest market share, which means that Internet Explorer (running on Windows) is going to win out. Sometimes it’s just easier to standardize on one browser type and require visitors to conform. The reasons for requiring a certain browser can vary, but if you’ve ever developed a website, you know there are some annoying differences between how various web browsers render HTML. I still have hope for a day when user-agent strings reflect the actual browser rather than trying to trick servers into serving the correct content, but for now, this is just a continuation of a long, sad browser user-agent lineage.From Wikipedia: Usage share of web browsers Is it wise for Internet Explorer 11 to try to hide its identity? I’m sure in some convoluted way it makes sense based on how web applications are serving up different content based on user-agent strings.
Will IE11 support moz-prefixed functionality? Of course, that’s usually not the case, especially when it comes to vendor-prefixed functionality.
Gecko- and WebKit-based browsers both are considered to have better standards support than Internet Explorer (generally well-deserved prior to IE10), so tricking servers into identifying IE11 as a Gecko-based browser could mean that the browser can handle the same content (JavaScript, CSS) as Firefox. By adding “like Gecko” at the end, it is self-selecting into the category of Gecko-based browsers (step 6). In short, by removing “MSIE” in favor of “IE”, the browser is forcing itself to not be identified as Internet Explorer (step 1). So if the Internet Explorer 11 user-agent string is the final one, it causes some interesting logic to happen in this case.
#Internet explorerer emulator mac windows#
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible MSIE 10.0 Windows NT 6.1 Trident/6.0)