UserAgentList and Browser detection

I've been going crazy with a problem for the past week, but I just figured it out, and it's related to NOD. I use IE 6.0, but Web sites that I visit (including Yahoo) thought I was running Netscape. I'd get a banner across my Yahoo screen: "You are running Netscape."

After some research, I determined that there is a Registry key called "User Agent" which contains the identifying string your browser sends. For IE, it might be something like "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)" -- the use of Mozilla is a throwback to the early days of browsers. I carefully checked every instance of this key in the Registry, and they were all correct, but the problem persisted. The string being sent by my browser was simply "Mozilla/4.0", without the rest of the information. I couldn't figure out why.

Finally, I decided to search for Mozilla/4.0 in the Registry. Besides the usual places, it popped up in the IMON UserAgentList entry. Here's the kicker: the minute I uninstalled NOD, the problem disappeared, and my browser was now properly identified by all Web sites.

Theories? I am thinking that, for whatever reason, the Web sites were checking the "UserAgentList" Registry entry instead of "User Agent". Maybe they look for anything with "UserAgent" in it? Who knows? So, since the only browser-related string it could recognize was "Mozilla/4.0" (without the qualifying string needed to identify something as IE), it used that to identify my browser; and, I believe a string of simply "Mozilla/4.0" gets interpreted as Netscape.

Postscript: as soon as I reinstalled NOD, the problem returned!

 

IE identifies itself as Mozilla/4.0, no matter whether IMON is running or not. I wonder if you could post a link to the website you had problem with.

 

Marcos, the site I have a problem with is a popular one: My Yahoo, the personalized version of Yahoo.

Actually, IE is not the only browser that identifies itself as Mozilla. So does Netscape, and so do many others. It's the qualifiying information in the UserAgent string that tells you what's what. For example:

"Mozilla/4.0" -- this is Netscape (and there are many versions of the string to identify specific Netscape releases)

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)" -- this is IE 6.0 under XP.

Note: I'm not sure, but I believe this behavior started with one of the later versions of NOD. I don't recall this problem existing when I first bought NOD a year ago. Since then I've upgraded to XP SP2.