Microsoft doesn’t want Mac users to switch!
Which, on the whole, is a Good Thing™. But the way they convey the message is disgusting.
A friend pointed me to Microsoft India’s Vista Promotion (for its humor value, of course), which I tried to access using Safari on my Mac. This is the page I got back:
<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0.1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
</HEAD></HTML>
It is not as innocuous as it may look; there’s an infinite redirect loop on line 1. Safari didn’t crash, of course, but MS still tried.
I figured I’d see what happened if I changed the user-agent string (which, by the way, is how websites can identify what browser you are using.) I asked Safari to masquerade as Internet Explorer using a fake user-agent string, just for kicks. And lo!, the entire page showed up! Quelle surprise!
Microsoft have pulled this trick before during the launch of Windows XP (and again, and again). Will they never learn? Will they ever stop being such immature kids and not try to prevent competing browsers from viewing their websites?
I would’ve said they just lost a customer, but I wasn’t one to begin with, so that doesn’t make much sense.
Did they actually do like that? Its unbelievable really.
Anurag Mishra — February 18, 2007 @ 12:11 am