Opera

You may receive a message on a site stating that you need a "4.0 or above browser" or similar in order to view a site. The reason for this may be that a script for browser detection looks for either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, and since you're not using either of those browsers, the site won't allow you access.

Unfortunately, there is little we can do on our end since Opera is not one of those browsers. However, it is possible for Opera to pretend to be another browser. Right-click in an empty space on the page, and select "Edit site preferences". Under the "Network" tab in the site preferences dialog, you can change the "Browser identification" setting to spoof another browser. With the "identify as" settings, it is still possible for the server to identify Opera by looking at the identication string Opera reports to the server, while the "mask as" options will completely hide "Opera" from the identification string.

Please note that this setting will only apply to the specific server under the "General" tab in the site preferences dialog. Opera will still identify as itself to all other sites.

The best thing to do to try and alleviate this problem is to get the message across to as many people as possible that Opera should be supported in the sort of browser-sniffing script that causes you to receive this error message. We suggest you e-mail the web site's webmaster and request that the script be changed to support Opera and other alternative browsers.

You may also point this person to the following pages:

Opera for Web Designers

Why Open the Web?

Starting with Opera 8, there is also a menu option designed for making it easier to report problems with specific sites. This will report the URL, your comments and some basic system settings to Opera, and we will investigate these reports and see if there's anything that can be done to circumvent the problem.

This menu option is available from Help > Report a site problem....