MSN now purposely "fudging" look of MSN.com site?

MSN.com changes its code to make it look bad in other browsers

[celerityfm]

Tune your opera browser to Identify as MSIE 5.0 (File-->Preferences-->Browser Identification) and reload the MSN.com front page a few times... then switch to Identify as Opera and then reload it a few times.. notice a difference?

MSN may be wrecking the look of its front page to encourage people to download IE or just to "prove" that Opera can't display its front page properly, when in fact it does and therefore invalidates their excuse as to why they were locking out Opera.. the real reason? Well.. we'll see what their next excuse is.

Of interest, It locks you out if you identify as Mozilla 3.0.. and it does not display properly if you choose Mozilla 4.76 (just like with Opera as the identity), however Mozilla 5.0 displays just like IE 5.0. I am using Opera v5.12.

[TallTroll]

I viewed msn.com in Opera 5.12 (as IE 5.0), and IE 5.5, and saved the source as a .txt file. File size for Opera = 27,932 bytes, IE = 27,774 bytes. There is some variation to be expected as there is a little dynamic content on the page, but you would ahve to check it over line for line to be sure they aren't serving different content per browser

[TallTroll]

Hah, found one difference already. I opened the 2 text files in Word, so they come up looking like web pages... except they don't look alike. The file saved from IE comes up font TNR, points = 12, Opera TNR, points = 10

I'm not sure if its significant or not, but I seem to be getting different CSS files from the cited source in the <link> tag, depending on what Opera announces itself as

>> .persbtn {background-color: #ffffff; background-image: url(http://msimg.com/m/r/btn_pers_tile.gif); background-position: bottom; background-repeat: repeat; border: none; color: #003399; cursor: hand; font-weight: bold; font-size: 11px; height: 23px;}

versus

>> .persbtn {background-color: #ffffff; background-image: url(http://msimg.com/m/r/btn_pers_tile.gif); background-position: bottom; background-repeat: repeat; border: none; color:#003399; cursor: hand; font-weight: bold; font-size: .7em; height: 23px;}

Spot the difference? Would this account for variations in display?

[celerityfm]

Thats pretty scary.. I mean, sure you can optimize a site for browsers, but I personally believe they are setting it up to look trashy on purpose so they can say "See! I told you it didn't look good on Opera.." makes me wonder if it really does look bad on Netscape too?