I just found the cool debug menu in Safari. Can't belive how easy it is to view sites now. I went to yahoo.ca where it said Safari isnt' supported, changed support to MSIE 6 and it loaded right away. Here's my question though, it makes sense to leave it set at MSIE 6 so most pages will load. I'm just curious though, is there any performance hits in doing this, or would pages be buggy or anything? Or should I leave it at the default and switch when needed? What was the default anyway? Thanks!
I always try to make a point of notifying the management of companies with websites that discriminate against Macs that they are costing themselves business by doing so. It's also worth letting them know that these discriminatory policies are not saving them any development costs, because their existing sites work fine with Safari if you spoof the user agent string.
What's going on here is that companies hire incompetent boobs who've taken a course on web design at their local college, and all they've learned is how to run Front Page. So they don't know how to make standards-complient web pages, and they think that by setting MSIE 6.0 as a requirement, they can avoid having to learn anything new.
Making sure that management knows their web-design staff is incompetent help ensure that there are jobs for competent web developers who write standards-complient webpages.
There is no overhead or anything like that when you change the user-agent. It doesn't affect the way a page is rendered, either. All that does is tell the website you are visiting that you're running Internet Explorer, or at least it tricks it into believing thats the case. Any website that forbids you to see the page because you're running anything but IE is just using a bit of Javascript to check the user-agent. If it sees anything but IE, it will load a seperate page with the error, otherwise it loads the default page.
Its completely safe to leave it as IE.
Trev
__________________
-Macbook Pro 2GHz Core Duo 15.4", 2GB, 100GB, Superdrive, Airport, BT, 256MB ATI x1600
-iPhone 8GB
That's not entirely true. Go to www.google.com as default, then click to switch to MSIE 6.0. The font changes and you get more options along the bottom for customizing the way google looks, all of which work. So some things are hidden if you're not on IE.
That's not entirely true. Go to www.google.com as default, then click to switch to MSIE 6.0. The font changes and you get more options along the bottom for customizing the way google looks, all of which work. So some things are hidden if you're not on IE.
In this particular case they are using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). They probably have one specificially for IE users which activates when they see someone with IE. This is not really the same thing as the page rendering differently just because its mascarading as IE. The website is specifically checking for IE and making changes based on that. If I was to code a page using strictly HTML that looked fine in Safari, switching it to look like IE would not make Safari render it any differently. It still uses the Webkit engine to render. IE's conformance to W3 standards sucks, thats why there are websites that specifically look for IE and either deny all others or send a different set of "instructions" so it will work correctly. If Microsoft would just work towards standards we wouldn't have the problems we do now.
Trev
__________________
-Macbook Pro 2GHz Core Duo 15.4", 2GB, 100GB, Superdrive, Airport, BT, 256MB ATI x1600
-iPhone 8GB
Linear Mode
