1

I am working on a production issue which only occurs in IE10 and not in chrome/Firefox. If I change the IE10's user-agent (F12) to Mozilla Firefox it works.

I need to debug the app. layer to find the issue, but till that can I suggest my client to modify user-agent.

The client due to security & other org policy do not and cannot use/install any other browser other than IE10.

Note: The errors are not client specific, the service which client code calls is failing.

What are the implications, in general of changing the user-agent of a browser (leaving aside any business logic conditional to the browser)?

Improve this question
1
  • None at all. I don't believe any browser behaves differently based on how you set its User-Agent string.
    – reinierpost
    May 11, 2015 at 8:03

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
0

When you change the user-agent in a browser, changes the way web servers recognize you, not the way the browser works.

Improve this answer
0

Changing the user agent will not have any impact on performance or security.

I wonder why doing so changes the behavior of the client anyway. It is possible that, apart from sending the user agent in the HTTP request, IE tries to behave differently when executing JavaScript or parsing HTML (i.e. maybe after you have changed the user agent it wont get in the <!--[if IE]> code chunks?). If this happens then the problem is that different browsers are executing/parsing different code.

Improve this answer
5
  • maybe I missed to indicate, but the error is not at the client side, the service URL that client calls is failing. The URL even fails when directly hitting it in browser's address bar(with an active session), but only in IE.
    – akjain
    May 11, 2015 at 8:43
  • @akjain: yeah, you can definitely change (i.e. redirect, deny...) the request on the server side depending on the user agent. Before IE 10, user agent mayor versions had one digit. Maybe the server is getting the first digit (1) and perhaps it is not even responding to such "old" versions of IE. The problem may be hard to find/solve, but the answer to your question is clear anyway: it wont have implications on security/performance. ;-)
    – Peque
    May 11, 2015 at 8:54
  • @akjain: have you tried with IE 9? And IE 11? (if it exists, I don't know xD)
    – Peque
    May 11, 2015 at 8:57
  • Yes even with IE9, same issue.
    – akjain
    May 11, 2015 at 9:16
  • @akjain: well, you can tell your client to change the user agent while you try to find the problem. Remember that yeah, your server can change its behavior depending on the user agent (if that's what it has been told to do, of course). Good luck.
    – Peque
    May 11, 2015 at 9:48

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .