User Agent - User Agent Sniffing

The term user agent sniffing refers to the practice of Web sites showing different content when viewed with a certain user agent. On the Internet, this will result in a different site being shown when browsing the page with a specific browser. A useful example of this is Microsoft Exchange Server 2003's Outlook Web Access feature. When viewed with Internet Explorer 6 (or newer), more functionality is displayed compared to the same page in any older browsers, because older browsers could not render the same content. User agent sniffing is mostly considered poor practice, since it encourages browser-specific design and penalizes new browsers with unrecognized user agent identifications. Instead, the W3C recommends creating HTML markup that is standard, allowing correct rendering in as many browsers as possible, and to test for specific browser features rather than particular browser versions or brands.

Web sites specifically targeted towards mobile phones, like NTT DoCoMo's I-Mode or Vodafone's Vodafone Live! portals, often rely heavily on user agent sniffing, since mobile browsers often differ greatly from each other. Many developments in mobile browsing have been made in the last few years, while many older phones that do not possess these new technologies are still heavily used. Therefore, mobile Web portals will often generate completely different markup code depending on the mobile phone used to browse them. These differences can be small, e.g., resizing of certain images to fit smaller screens, or quite extensive, e.g., rendering of the page in WML instead of XHTML.