[thelist] Re: browser detection for fun and profit

William Kolean williamkolean at nyc.rr.com
Wed Jan 22 08:15:01 CST 2003


> "Apple's Web site now recognizes what browser you are using - as
> long
> as     you are surfing with its new Safari Web browser. A small Safari
> icon     appears in the top-left corner of Apple.com with the message
> "Welcome     Safari user"
>
>
>
>
> Any idea how they achieve this - since Safari can spoof its identiy,
> there must presumably be a unique object or combination of object
> returns that can be used to identify it uniquely?

Safari uses the following UA string by default:

Netscape 5.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48
(like Gecko) Safari/48

Notice that "Safari" is in the string. You can read more about Apple's
decision to use this UA string in David Hyatt's Jan. 8th blog:

http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/archives/2003_01.html

There are utilities that enable a Debug option in Safari that normally isn't
there, and it the debug menu is the option to spoof other UA strings. I'm
not sure if "Safari" still appears in the spoofed UA strings.

William




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