The HTC Desire can report about itself as Macintosh — and it reports ...

^{Waking up one morning after a restless sleep, Gregor Zamza discovered that in his bed he had turned into a terrible insect.}

This morning, I finally came up with the idea of logging into the website whatsmyuseragent.com from my HTC Desire mobile phone in order to find out what its browser identifier is “user-agent”. Having put this idea into practice, I suddenly saw in front of me on the screen this line:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/530.17 

Stunned, I froze in amazement for almost a minute, until I didn’t remember that the browser has the “Mobile View” function (with the subtitle “Enable mobile versions of web pages”) in the settings. I have disabled this feature (and quite a while), since the mobile versions of many sites are much less functional than those intended for desktop computers. Turning it on for the time being, I updated the page and got a line that reflects the reality much closer:
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 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-ru; Desire_A8181 Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 

It seems that this is a reason to think hard.

Not only the message about mobility and the indication “Android”, but many other characteristics (the operating system, the language mentioned with it, even the browser version) completely change after you turn off the mobile viewing mode - and meanwhile, disabling it is extremely convenient and even sometimes necessary. The more HTC cell phones are distributed around the world (as well as other Android cell phones, the browsers in which are built according to the same algorithm), the less we can all trust these statistics collected by HTTP request headers .