[thelist] MSN locks out non IE browsers

[Matt]

I was able to get in via NN 4.7 on a Mac, but it looked awful. Not unreadable,
but pretty damn horrible, with unstyled text all over the place. This is what
we get for the government letting them off the hook...

James Aylard wrote:

> Mike, et al,
>
> > Netscape 6 can get in without a problem.  Interesting, though, how they
> seem
> > to be blocking Opera.  Are there any technical issues that would keep the
> > latest version of Opera from rendering the page the same as IE and NS6 or
> > could Opera (since it's now free and, therefore, possibly seen as a threat
> > by MS) be the next target of a MS takedown?
>
>     Netscape 6 (and Netscape 4.x, btw) can get in, while Mozilla 0.9.5
> cannot. Clearly Microsoft is winnowing browsers based on UA string, rather
> than object support, and it is apparently working from a fairly restricted
> list of "okay" UA strings. Pre-release and small, third-party browsers
> apparently aren't on the list.
>     Frankly, Opera is such a small blip on the radar that I can't imagine
> Microsoft expending much energy to actively stamp it out. Likely, anyone
> using Opera already has some level of animus toward Microsoft, and isn't
> likely to switch browsers because msn.com says to do so -- if that person is
> even actively using msn.com to begin with. Instead, Microsoft probably just
> doesn't want to expend the energy and money to ensure that pre-release and
> small, third-party browsers work with msn.com's new features, and has chosen
> not to create a secondary version of the site to support them.
>
> James Aylard
>
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