The RSS Platform User-Agent String

On the IE blog, Eric Lawrence presented the User-Agent string for the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 which will be available later this year. The RSS Platform will also introduce an updated User-Agent string for use with the IE8 beta. For details on the RSS Platform User-Agent string in IE7 please take a look at my past blog post.

The change is a simple increment of the version number to "2.0" as in

Windows-RSS-Platform/2.0 (MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)

And as before, note that there are two cases to keep in mind:

  1. The user is not subscribed to the feed. The user navigates to a feed and IE presents a preview of the content.
  2. The user is subscribed to the feed. The RSS Platform retrieves the feed content on a schedule (or on demand).

In the first case, the request is made by IE and hence the IE User-Agent string is used.

In the second case, the RSS Platform User-Agent string is used.

- Walter vonKoch
Program Manager