Hiding user-agent

From the Mobile 2.0 Conference: Scott Rafer from WINKsite:

The question was [paraphrased], “My team has spent a lot of time customizing for handsets. Now Opera Mini is hiding all the user agents from its users’ sessions. Where do you get off doing so?” As an aside to normal people, user agents are how web sites, mobile or otherwise, know what browser you are using and what kind of PC or phone hardware it is running on.

Mr. McCathieNevile’s answer [again paraphrased] was, “We’re tired of developers not allowing users to access applications based on their handset. Users would prefer a 95% solution, and our browser almost always provides one.” Though amicably phrased, this answer really means, “We think users and developers are too dumb to handle data transparency.” We blogging loons know how well that works.

F***! Can not believe it…

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