but it matters to some of us.
Apparently (if you have dreadfully clever software like the basic web browsers that come with a linux installation) you can spoof your user agent string.
Your user string is what your web browser sends through to a web server to indicate what nature of beast it is. For example, my current user string is "Mozilla, XP" (or whatever would be appropriately formatted text representing the same info).
And web servers collect this information at great length in logs, and the people who make the site occasionally look at the results.
(Incidentally, if you want to see some results, check out Victoria's
analysis of the traffic to the Victoria International Student's site. Everything you could possibly want to know...)
One of the statistics traced is which browsers are looking at what, and mostly importantly, which browsers are turning up in numbers to be worth bothering with. At the moment, flavours of Internet Explorer on a Windows platform are the most popular web browsers, so most web designers will maximise their sites to look good in those types of set ups.
The badness of spoofing your user string is that you will turn up in statistics as mainstream, when you are not. This means that the people who make web sites will continue to believe that they are servicing the needs of the majority of people who look at their site - even though this may not be actually true.
But why on earth would I be arguing that people would want *more* web browsers to worry about designing for? Well, aside from my inherant dislike of any corporate building the main web browsing platform (monopoly anyone?) there is a standard, which is supposed to define what different web instructions should make a page look like. If the different browsers were prepared to follow those instructions, the plethora wouldn't be a problem.
Incidentally, yesterday at work, I checked out some statistics about homicide in America (as you do), and discovered that 40 odd % of all homicide victims are black, and 40 odd are white. Which makes me wonder what percentage were asian (including indian), hispanic, or native american. Or if, magically, all non-whites were black.
Posted by carla at January 24, 2004 10:11 PM