The other day, I was trying to download MSN messenger. I went over to their site and got this page from where I could download their messenger program.

Unfortunately, that link didn't work. Clicking it brought me to a page where I was asked to click "Go" to download MSN. Clicking "Go" brought me back to the previous page!

I was using Firefox, and I realised that this is another nasty trick that MS has pulled up it's sleeve to annoy non-IE users. I changed the User-Agent string to that of IE and loaded the page again. Voila! The download worked.

Try it yourself. Follow this link, and click on the "click here to download manually" link from a non-IE browser. Then try Internet Explorer.

I decided to get under the hood and see what the problem was.

The "click here to download manually link" actually calls a javascript function LaunchDownload(). Different User-Agent strings (IE/non-IE) return a different download URL! Have a look at the piece of HTML code i got.

... from http://messenger.msn.com/download/downloadx.aspx when using a non-IE browser, around line 23

var strDownloadUrl = "/Download/default.aspx";

function LaunchDownload(){location.href=strDownloadUrl;}

... from http://messenger.msn.com/download/downloadx.aspx when using IE, around line 23

var strDownloadUrl = "http://g.msn.com/7MEEN_US/EN/SETUPDL.EXE";

function LaunchDownload(){location.href=strDownloadUrl;}

As is obvious, this is Microsoft's another blatant attempt at discouraging other browsers. I changed my user-agent string to Firefox, Mozilla and Opera; and the download did not work with any of them.

A google search for problems with non-IE browsers came up with the news story refered to at the bottom. From that news story:

MSN's director of marketing, Bob Visse commented on supporting other browsers on the MSN site, "the experience may be slightly degraded simply because they don't support the standards we support closely, as far as the HTML standard in those browsers."

Great! I can see the standard incompatibility that causes this download problem.


Related news:
Microsoft backpedals on MSN browser block
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-274980.html?legacy=cnet