Andy Hedges’ Tech Blog

I have noticed this user agent string in my log files a few times recently:

MSIE 8.0 Beta; Windows NT 6.1 Beta

Whilst it is fairly common to see spoofed user agent strings with not-yet-released-or-even-likely user agent strings this one seems interesting for a few reasons.

1. NT 6.1 would likely be the version number of Longhorn [NT, 4.0; 2000, 5.0; XP, 5.1; 2003, 6.0]
2. MSIE 8.0 would likely be the version number they would use to maintain parity with Netscapes version numbers. Although Netscape isn’t a threat to Microsoft anymore there is a long history of version number one up manship between the two browsers.
3. The user agent string is no longer prefixed with Mozilla/4.0 as it always has been for the historic reason that web servers used to block IE back in the MSIE 2 days as it was so hopelessly rubbish. Now would be a suitable time to drop that.

So it looks as though a possible rival to Firefox is on the horizon lets hope it has decent standards support and no activex or any other proprietary crap - well I can dream.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 26th, 2005 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.