barnes and noble doesn't know my browser

Weird issue, wonder if anyone else can confirm/deny...

If I go to www.bn.com (barnes and noble website) in IE7, it redirects me to their mobile site http://www.barnesandnoble.com/mobile/index.asp

If I go to it in firefox, it brings up the normal site.

Before the IE bashing starts, I tested on another computer in the office, in IE7, and it works fine (also tested an IE6), however at least one friend at another location reported the same issue in IE7, so I know its not just my computer.

Someone is not parsing a useragent correctly for some reason...

What about you guys?

I ended up here

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Works for me in IE 7.

as do a handful of my PCs, but several redirect to the mobile site.. its pretty odd..

CVS won't let you in their website if you don't have IE or Firefox. Poor Mac users (Opera users too). I sent them an e-mail complaining :)

well technically Mac users can use firefox or IE can't they??? They don't have to use that swiss cheese browser called safari

IE is no longer available for the Mac, but Firefox is. So is Camino, which is also Gecko-based.

Almost a pity, really, because IE 5 for the Mac was way ahead of its Windows cousin.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kleinma

well technically Mac users can use firefox or IE can't they??? They don't have to use that swiss cheese browser called safari

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If you've used Firefox on the Mac you'd know it sucks. Camino is nice because it's Firefox but setup to work well on the Mac. Not sure if they have the same Agent string.

Webkit is a pretty good rendering engine. Safari needs some work but the rendering engine isn't half bad.

IE on the Mac was discontinued some time ago and was equivelant to IE5 on Windows so it's junk and useless.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by penagate

Almost a pity, really, because IE 5 for the Mac was way ahead of its Windows cousin.

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I think you're thinking of the MSN browser for OS X. IE for the Mac was equivelant to IE5 on Windows but came out around IE4 I believe so at the time it was better but later Microsoft created an MSN web browser for the Mac that was actually quite standards based and better than IE6 in that regard.

I used to do tech support for Apple and people constantly told me about the MSN browser but I was never able to find any information on it on Microsoft's website or a place to download it.

IE 5 for Mac and MSN for Mac OS X both used the Tasman engine which never made it to the Windows version.

Have you cross referenced the settings for the computer that gets the redirect and the one that does not. It would have to be some setting in IE doing that to you.

no.. I didnt bother because I dont care too much to be honest. I posted it here because I found it interesting, and I posted a quick note to the BN webmaster, but I am not going to troubleshoot THEIR bad programming when I have plenty of my own programming to call bad and troubleshoot :)