SharePoint: How does MOSS know the user has InfoPath installed?

Your browser tells a web server a lot of stuff about you each time you visit a web site. These include the browser version, Windows version, screen resolution and colors, .Net version installed and if you have InfoPath.

Here's a sample of what is sent as part of the User-Agent string:

• User-Agent=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)

What can we tell from this example:

• Internet Explorer 6.0 (MSIE 6.0)
• Windows XP Service Pack 1 (Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
• InfoPath 2007 (InfoPath.2)
• 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 .Net runtimes installed (.NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)

Here's another user:

• User-Agent=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.2)

Very similar, but is using Internet Explorer 7.0 and only has .Net 1.1 and 2.0 installed.


This one is interesting in that it is coming from a server (maybe):

• User-Agent=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; SV1)

Windows NT 5.2 is either Windows Server 2003, XP Professional 64 Bit, or Windows Home Server. (Interesting reuse of a version number!) One other note, the user in this example is running a 32 bit version of IE 6.0 on a 64 bit machine. WOW64 = Windows-on-Windows 64-bit.

And this one is from a FireFox 2.0 user:

• User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1

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