Opera to remove IE disguise?

Opera Software is considering reversing a decision that it made in the midst of the browser wars by correctly identifying its browser to Web sites in the future.

The browser company altered its software to mimic Internet Explorer (IE) during the late nineties when pro-Microsoft Webmasters engineered their sites to send broken HTML code to browsers that identified themselves as Opera. This practice has become increasingly rare which has led Opera to reconsider its decision to mimic IE, according to an company spokesman.

Opera 8.10, a beta version of the browser that was released last week, identifies itself as Opera by default. The Opera spokesman said it will gather feedback from those testing this release and will then decide whether to include this feature in a public release of Opera.

"We have asked external beta testers to see if they encounter any problems. We'll make a decision at a later stage," said the spokesman.

If Opera does decide to change this feature it is likely to improve their rating on browser usage charts, as many Opera users are mistakenly counted as IE users. Jon von Tetzchner, the chief executive of Opera, expressed his frustration at this statistical problem in an interview earlier this year, during which he claimed that Opera is undercounted and Firefox is overcounted.