It turns out that my own ranting skills might be rusty. I'm far too used to having to bite my tongue and then explain everything to the client. I blame my colleagues. Apparently its company policy to be helpful. Anyway. Agent sniffing is just not reliable. The ubiquity of the "Mozilla" prefix and the less popular but still prolific "like Gecko" suffix exist because agent sniffing wasn't helping the actual users. It hasn't been reliable for donkey's years and it does lead to just the kind of problem the OP ran into. Friends don't let other friends read the user agent string. My big issue with agent sniffing is that as a regular user of Internet Explorer, (Lumia 920 and Surface RT as well as good old desktop IE), it seems like almost every day I face a page that renders wrongly because someone wrote a website, either (still!!!) assuming that a browser identifying itself as "MSIE" is going to use the old IE6 box model; or perhaps they didn't check anything at all and just assumed that all browsers on a touch screen device are going to include JavaScript features only available to iPads. I also still have a Nexus-One for travelling with. That bad boy uses the "Android Browser" and it has almost no "modern" features despite it also having "Mozilla/5.0" at the beginning of its agent string. I do agree though that a reboot shouldn't have been required. It is vicious cruelty on the part of the web server vendor. Is that better? I'm a little worried, like I might have gone too far. I don't like to get overexcited like this. Right now I want to go and punch one of those gym punching bag things and then write a strongly worded letter to the local council about the state of some of the footpaths in my area.
