Onestat.com's browser sniffer older than my son
Wednesday, 9. September 2009, 19:34:47
I'm not paying that much attention to stats myself, being too busy doing the work that will hopefully smoothen out compatibility problems and make it possible to grow our usage share. It's exactly the type of brokenness Jon found on onestat.com I fear the most - a bit hidden away, subtle, annoying when the user needs that page to work but perhaps not disastrous enough to notify us of. Too many of these issues, and we've lost a user! (Unless, of course, the user happens to be our CEO
Now, deep inside the Onestat scripts is some code to handle browser differences. The script assumes that a browser below a certain level of DOM support can't be expected to create menus after the document loaded. That's of course not a bad assumption to make - until you see the sniffing they use to determine whether you have sufficient DOM support. Here is the relevant part:
if(kh.indexOf("Opera/7")>-1||kh.indexOf("Opera 7")>-1)return "Op7";
.
.
else if(kh.indexOf("Opera")>-1)return "Default";
Check the calendar, sir: we're in late 2009. Opera 7 - the only Opera version this script thinks is capable of opening the menu a second time - was released in January 2003. That's a 6 year old browser sniffer! I hope the script that generates their statistics is a bit more up to date!
And it's more than a little ironic that a web statistics company contributes to Opera's low usage share by running such old and broken code on their website.











