Browser racism???

[jgpaiva]

Ok... Following up on the following message: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=3956.msg27826#msg27826
I'm protesting against browser racism!

How is this possible? In that thread, kimmchii mentioned he could download the file from betanews and i couldn't. The problem was that i was under opera and kimmchii was using firefox. When i tried using ff, it also worked for me.
(notice that this must have been intended, since opera is redirected to another site, and firefox is given the download)

Is this normal, have you ever seen other cases of "browser xenophobia"?

[kimmchii]

actually Firefox and IE (and clones) are ok, when i tried Opera i got Access denied, but as soon as i change the UserAgent (via Proxo) in Opera to Firefox or IE, Opera could download fine.

[f0dder]

actually Firefox and IE (and clones) are ok, when i tried Opera i got Access denied, but as soon as i change the UserAgent (via Proxo) in Opera to Firefox or IE, Opera could download fine.

Which means that browser racism is in effect, duh

Seems pretty silly of the site to do something like that.

[Carol Haynes]

It may be me but I get the impression that since MS released ASP.NET 2.0 there seems to be all sorts of problem - lots of MS pages (and other ASP based sites) don't display properly in Firefox.

Can't help feeling this is deliberate on the part of MS trying to force people back to using Internet Explorer.

[Josh]

This "Browser racism" is nothing new. Its existed for years, back when netscape 4 was king. Sites were either designed for MS IE, or netscape, or even sometimes both, leaving out browsers from alternate platforms such as linux, unix, and mac (or even BeOS). I have downloaded windows vista beta 2 from MS with all three browsers, opera, firefox and IE, no problems at all. I am using opera 9 beta 2, firefox 1.5.0.4, and ie 6 sp2.

[jgpaiva]

Seems pretty silly of the site to do something like that.

I think f0dder is the only one who understood what i mean. This is not one of those rendering errors.
I believe this was intentional, since there's distinction where there's no need, since in any other betanews page, i can download the files using opera, this is the only one that redirects.

[Josh]

Seems pretty silly of the site to do something like that.

I think f0dder is the only one who understood what i mean. This is not one of those rendering errors.
I believe this was intentional, since there's distinction where there's no need, since in any other betanews page, i can download the files using opera, this is the only one that redirects.

My post wasnt regarding the rendering issues per say, but it was more regarding browser identification in general, what you describe is nothing new. Yes, microsoft might be blocking you from d/ling windows vista b2 with opera or firefox, but I dont think they are, as I've successfully done it in both. The only error I've gotten is a download server busy message because everyone and their mothers is trying to d/l it.

Also, I failed to realize you meant the Fileforum link, that is my fault. I would suggest using the windowsvista site anyways, microsoft probably requested fileforum not host the file as they want people to register for a key instead of emailing them complaining about not being able to install because they dont have a key. Either that, or betanews has disabled access temporarily due to the huge amounts of bandwidth that was being used on their servers.