Yahoo homepage different under Mozilla Firefox

[Mike]

Hey all,

I installed Mozilla Firefox on my home machine to see if I liked it last night, and I noticed that Yahoo's homepage is different when viewed under Firefox. Instead of having the search tabs for image, directory, web, etc, it had a drop down box.

I'll attach a screenshot below (small and blurry but you get the idea). Not sure if this is a Yahoo thing, or if Mozilla detects the tabs and displays the page differently..

[NFFC]

It's called user agent cloaking, by all accounts is a very, very, very bad thing to do.

[robwatts]

I'd call it UA delivery, used for the purpose of giving the user a usable page.

IMO a very, very, good thing to do ;)

[Mike]

right but why would yahoo want to give firefox users a different version of it's page than IE users? It's odd

[NFFC]

>right but why would yahoo want to give firefox users a different version of it's page than IE users?

Have a look at the page in firefox but set your UA to IE.

[polarmate]

right but why would yahoo want to give firefox users a different version of it's page than IE users? It's odd
Because Yahoo does not follow recommended web standards on their web site and their web site looks different (or you could say crappier) in some browsers. So they use browser sniffers to detect browsers and serve a browser specific version of their web site. Which can be expensive in terms of resources, performance as well as maintenance of their web site.

This approach can be quite futile if the UA is set to some other UA but that of the browser itself.

[jcoronella]

I wish Yahoo would cloak firefox for yahoo mail - so that it would work to send a message ;)