IE11 no longer identifies itself

7 points

13 years ago

I haven't seen this picked up elsewhere, so I thought I'd point it out. In earlier Windows previews, IE11 had supposedly switched to using "IE 11.0" in the user agent string instead of "MSIE 11.0" in order to break most current browser detection and have sites deliver fully capable versions to the latest IEs. However, I just installed the Windows 8.1 preview, and IE11 actually gives me this as a User-Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Note the complete lack of "IE" or "MSIE"... if you really want to know that it's IE, you need to use the Trident string as the key indicator, I'd say, and then the "rv:" to capture the browser version.

Also, all the other major browsers (Chrome, FF, Opera) don't pick up NT 6.3 (Windows 8.1 OS) in the preview... they're all showing 6.2, while IE shows 6.3.

No idea if that's the ultimate agent that will go out with the full release of 8.1, obviously.

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