Gone all quiet...

Due to a combination of apathy, Lurgy and work-related-"oh-what's-the-point"-ism, I've not actually written much here recently. I'll try to change that soon. I've actually got several updates bubbling under, which I must write up sharpish, before they leak out my ears altogether.

Browser Statistics: Browser Detection and User-Agent Spoofing

[As some of you may have noticed, I'm a bit of a web browser weenie. Some of my bubbling-under posts are about web browser statistics. So, as a prelude, here's an updated version of something I wrote for a different audience some time ago]

Many common web statistics analysis packages are lousy at identifying browsers beyond a few market leaders. In the case of openly-published large-scale web browser statistics, browser detection/identification is almost uniformly apalling. To be fair, it is particularly difficult to do this job well. The only remotely accurate way to identify a browser from the server-side is to analyse the HTTP "User-Agent" header that the browser sends when it requests a file. Unfortunately, this isn't as simple as it may sound. Here are some of the problems.

( browser-weenie-ism )