I mentioned that sites only know what browsers _say_ they are,
not what they _really_ are.

Bob Jarvis wrote:
	OK.  How many people make use of that fact to mask their browser use?  I
	submit that the number of people doing this is vanishingly small - far less
	than 1 percent.

That's completely irrelevant.  The question that matters is
"does anyone PROVIDING browsers have any reason to identify their browser,
by default, as IE" and the answer is "yes of course they do", and the
second question is "do any of the browser providers actually do this"
and the answer to that is again "yes, of course they do".

Amongst other things, consider the issue of Javascript compatibility (not
that there is such a thing, but you know what I mean).  Suppose a web site
can recognise Netscape and IE, and tailors its DHTML for one or the other.
Then a browser had *BETTER* announce itself as Netscape or as IE, rather
than as itself, so that it can be used by the people who don't know or care
how to configure it.  If one of the browsers is better supported by web sites
than the other, then the browser had better, BY DEFAULT, announce itself as
the one that is better supported.

Accordingly, there is every reason for browser providers to have their
(non-netscape, non-IE) browsers announce themselves as some version of IE.
It doesn't any longer mean "who are you", it means "which HTML/DHTML
dialect do you want".

Because of that shift in meaning, site statistics based on browser
identification DO reliably inform us of HTML/DHTML dialect preference,
but DON'T reliably tell us anything about browser preference.