[plug] Re: Wars with Browser

[Arie Hol]

>>On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 20:00, Bernard Blackham wrote:

8< --snip-- >8

>>Funny thing is I get the feeling that something in their scripts tests
>>what browser the client is using and dumps them if they are using Linux.

8< --snip-- >8

For any body who is interested : 

When a user enters a URL into his browser or clicks on an active link - to
visit 'a website' - the browser sends a 'request'  to the web server at the
URL specified/selected by the user. 

This request contains a  certain amount of specific information about the
browser, and its current configuration - set out below are some requests
from the different browsers that I use.

These requests were captured using a webserver which is a Perl script,
however the requests are exactly the same as would be sent to any other type
of webserver - Apache, IIS, AOL, etc....

All of the following requests have had the 'Host' details removed.

The first one (libwww-perl/5.63) is a Perl script which the user runs from
the command line.

GET / HTTP/1.1
Connection: close
User-Agent: libwww-perl/5.63

As you can see in the following, it is not difficult to determine which
version of browser and OS are being used at the client end.


GET / HTTP/1.0
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (Win98; U)
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8

GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.2) 
Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=
0.8,video/x-mng,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,text/css,*/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us, en;q=0.50
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, compress;q=0.9
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.66, *;q=0.66
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, 
application/x-shockwave-flash, */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)
Connection: Keep-Alive

GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.0.0-10; Linux)
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-control: no-cache
Accept: text/*, image/jpeg, image/png, image/*, */*
Accept-Encoding: x-gzip, gzip, identity
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1
Accept-Language: en

GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020408
Accept: ext/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,
text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,text/css,*
/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us, en;q=0.50
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, compress;q=0.9
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.66, *;q=0.66
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

GET / HTTP/1.0
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.18-3 i686)
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8

---------------------------------------------------------------------

As you can  see, some of them contain a great deal of information, so the
webservers don't need to test the browser - because the browser sends the
info anyway, but there are valid reasons for this.

Regards Arie

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For the concert of life, nobody has a program.

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