Sunday, April 20, 2008

experimenting with RealOne and Explorer's customization options

When RealPlayer is used as a browser, the user-agent string left behind reveals not only the version that is used to visit a site, but also some details about the version of Internet Explorer that is resident on the surfer's computer.

We have already seen (here) that Microsoft allows customization of user-agent strings. I customized a version of Explorer by inserting "Buckets", surfed over to useragentstring.com, and took this screen shot:


Then I exited Explorer, rebooted, and visited the same site using the RealOne Player.  Here is the screen shot:
Note that the change to the user agent string that I had made for Explorer (inserting 'Buckets') is still there, even though I'm using RealOne, not Explorer.

The presence of "Rogers Hi-speed Internet" in the user agent of 90sAREover, therefore, requires that his browser was one of those customized by Rogers, even if he wasn't using it to directly visit freedomsite.org.