Microsoft Knowledge Base access problem: getting the page to load

Regarding yesterday's report on Microsoft's explanation as to why its main Knowledge Base page does not load properly on the Mac, several readers expressed skepticism. In particular, they found ways to get the page to load on a Mac by "fooling" the page into thinking their Mac was really a Windows PC. In most cases, they could then successfully use the search engine. Presumably, this would not work if the problem was as Microsoft described. A few other readers pointed out that the problem, whatever it may be, does not appear to be with Java, as the page does not use Java. Here are some examples: "As far as I can tell, the full-featured page doesn't use Java, and Microsoft simply shunts non-Windows users to the alternate page based on the User-Agent header in their request. I was able to bring up the 'real' page in my Mac browsers (by using a proxy that claimed it was Communicator for Windows) and the search apparently worked OK." "As far as the redirection goes, it appears that Microsoft's server looks at the User-Agent header that the browser sends and directs the browser to the full-featured page or the backup on that basis. I set up a web proxy that always identifies itself as Communicator 4.7 on Windows. Then I set up my Mac browsers (IE 4.5 and Communicator 4.7) to use the proxy. I was able to access the full-featured search site with (apparently) no problems. I did a basic search with both browsers, although I did get one JavaScript error in IE. (But my experience is that many web sites have JavaScript code that IE can't handle.) I didn't see any evidence of an applet on the search page, so I don't know why Microsoft blames Java -> JavaScript communication in IE." [Larry Rosenstein] "Regardless what Microsoft says, changing your browser's identity to fool the web server into 'thinking' that a Windows-PC is calling does help in many (if not all) cases. You don't have to hack Netscape or IE to do this: iCab lets you enter any string you want (Preferences/Browser Name). Try this one: 'Mozilla/4.5 [en]C-QXW0101J (WinNT; I).' This is not an IE string, but it's from a NT machine and that's what counts."