There are some good uses for User Agent switching as Ben has outlined. Mark here also mentioned that Google is the biggest blind site visitor on the web.
A case for UA switching is that it should only be done to highlight the follies of browsers sniffing on sites (and I've been there and done that). As Nick said stick to your default setting (or in the case of Opera change it to the Opera setting - it used to ship as MSIE me thinks.)
The very fact we can switch UA's and have been able to since the days of Opera 5 or so highlights why we should never really trust any kind of data (e.g stats) based on information sent by the User Agent - HTTP_USER_AGENT, POST, GET , REFERER etc... Always filter what's presented to you.
Rounding out, those interested in Ben's line on MS should refer to the infamous Swedish Chef [1] edition of Opera 7, especially the part where "Oprah 7" [2] rendered MSN similar to IE (as did Opera 6). A good example of why building to standards can avoid embarrassment in the long run.
[1]http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/index.dml [2]http://my.opera.com/community/dev/discussion/openweb/20030206/
Bork Bork!
Cheers James
Ben Bishop wrote:
Using an User Agent switcher, you can see how some sites serve up different content based on the user agent.
For a demonstration of making content accessible to different users, in this case search engines such as Google, camouflage yourself with the Googlebot UA and visit some Microsoft web pages.
Regards, Ben
Nick Lo wrote:
ability to set the User Agent HTTP header to say it's another browser.
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