As some of you may have noticed, MS Australia has recently started an online competition to win
ten grand. But there is a catch! In order to participate, you must also travel back in time and switch to Internet Explorer 8. Otherwise, the page won't display the "clues" to get to the prize.
For all the fellas here who don't want to use IE8 and still have a chance of winning 10 grand, the solution is pretty simple. And you probably know it. The competition's Web site uses the User Agent string that is sent by the browser in order to display or not the needed content. I won't list the steps to do so in every browser, but to be able to see clues on the website, just use this as your user agent string : "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)". In Opera I think that this is called browser identification. And voilà. I tested the method using Konqueror and it worked like a charm.
However, you may appear in log and statistics that you use IE8, so there is potential harm doing so. Some browsers let you define a user agent string depending of the Web site. It would be really funny if somebody could win the competition using an alternate browser.
"And the winner is... John Smith, using... LYNX! What the..."
Now that the fun part is over, I find this very sad that Microsoft brought up the "You must use Internet Explorer to see the web page" thing again - it is like returning into the (very) dark ages of the Internet. And it would be no more acceptable that another browser vendor encourages such behaviour. As much as I don't like IE, I'd hate to see a Web page completely deny the access to a user just because he is using a particular browser. Web pages can render differently, have bugs that are browser-specific, but should not restrain the access on purpose using browser detection.
Then again, it is a competition, and with competition, comes rules. If you don't like the rules, don't enter.
As a side note, the terms of condition says this:
"The hidden webpage can only be viewed in Internet Explorer 8. The entrant must have download Internet Explorer 8 to successfully view the hidden webpage. Upon discovery of the hidden webpage, the entrant must register his/her details, via the hidden webpage 'Claim' button."
Nothing there says that you
must use IE8.
EDIT: Related blog/forum posts, found as I made a little research:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4291261http://www.finerrecliner.com/2009/06/17/the-irony-of-the-ie8-10000-challenge/
