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Microsoft Blocking Access via User-Agent

Earlier today, someone gave me a link to a file on Microsoft.com. Since the WebKit release, I’ve been using Safari much more (even though it’s not any faster – I haven’t yet built the new WebKit) because I was reminded that it is much less of a memory hog than Firefox has been lately for me.

I tried to open the link, a download page for some driver and received an error : “Sorry, we are unable to show you the page you requested. Please try again later.”

I tried in Firefox: worked fine.

Turns out that using a User-Agent with either “Safari/312” or “AppleWebKit” in it is enough for Microsoft to not share these files with you. Not only that, but it seems to apply to any files in their download area.

Mostly I’m just curious why they would bother.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2005 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Microsoft Blocking Access via User-Agent”

  1. Ben Ryan Says:
    June 16th, 2005 at 2:28 am

    I just called MS Tech support because Downloads blocked my Firefox. They said “It’s a Firefox problem, go talk to Mozilla”.. LOL and that was when I used my Microsoft Partner support 🙂 MS need a hot poker up their ar#es.