[gui-talk] Unable to Access Target.com

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Gerald Levy <bwaylimited at verizon.net> wrote:
> As I said , I am using IE 8, latest build, so there is no way that my
> browser could have been misidentified as IE 6.  This is obviously a
> deliberate effort by Target to restrict access to its site to consumers > who use IE 9 with Vista or Windows 7.

It's not "obviously" anything as the sort.

Please understand that it's actually quite hard to determine what
browser you're using from a user agent header string, so you're wrong
to assume it's hard to misidentity your browser.

Here's an example IE8 user agent header:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0;
SLCC2; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8)

Notice how it kicks off by claiming to be the Mozilla browser. This is
typical of the confusing nature of user agent strings. Worse still,
there are multiple variations for the same browser version. Here's a
list of different such strings for IE8, and they are only examples:

http://www.useragentstring.com/_uas_Internet%20Explorer_version_8.0.php

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis