Weblog Entry
Nutscrape
May 13, 2003Okay, who’s the smartass? And how did you do that?
It made me laugh anyway, whoever you are.
mezzoblue
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You are reading “Nutscrape”, an entry posted on 13 May, 2003, to the Placid collection. See other posts in this collection.
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Anyone can do that with the slightest bit of trouble:
telnet www.mezzoblue.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: www.mezzoblue.com
User-Agent: Nutscrape/6.1
Done.
It wasn’t me, for the record. :-)
In Mozilla or Firebird, enter in your address bar ‘about:config’. Then right click and select ‘New > String’. Then enter in the feild ‘general.useragent.override’ click ‘OK’ and then enter your new UA string.
For example my Mozilla defualt (which is at the top of the page of the about: page)) is ‘Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030310 Mozilla 1.3’ which you could change to ‘Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030310 mezzoblue’.
You can change other elements too under the subtitle ‘User Agent:’.
ahhhh. That clears up one mystery. Thanks guys.
Now if only there was a way to re-identify my copy of NN4.7 as ‘Your Worst Nightmare’…
A lot of these apparent old browsers are nothing of the sort, but robots and spiders pretending to be something they’re not.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, the following articles may help clarify things:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
I’ve seen the craziest browser tags in MacEdition’s logs. My favorite was an iCab user who had edited the user agent string to read “foofly-tailed red panda”. Obviously a person of impeccable taste and discernment.
The other mystery is why is anyone using Netscape 3? I mean, really?
It’s funny how the very, very bottom end is cluttered with oddities like that. Netscape 1.x? Who in the…? It makes me wonder if perhaps there are some developers out there just sitting and waiting for sites like the Garden so that they can run them through the most obsolete browser possible.
Funny thing is, the Garden works great in Netscapes 2 through 4, Lynx, and so forth. Sure, some of the older browsers don’t get the design - but the page loads and they get a well marked-up document regardless.
I keep looking at some stats for some sites that the company I work for hosts, and I keep seeing damn NN4.7 show up at somewhere around 1-3%. Then I started think…”Jason, how much of the surfing would you imagine are web designers/developers/testers/etc./etc.? I would guess…mabye 1-3%?? Makes you wonder if all those people out there still coding for NN4.x is doing so just for the benefit of dumb@$$ developers screwing with people’s stats!!
I’ve had to use Netscape 4.77 until very recently, as Citibank online in Spain would not allow me to connect using Mozilla, and I refuse to fiddle with my user agent, and I don’t run windows here.
Now I no longer need it: I just switched banks. This is an example of reasons why you can still be seeing Netscape 4.77: crapy browser detection logics in sites.