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Would be easy enough to compare prices on windows/linux in a vm on my mac though. And take note of the companies that do it. Something else to add to comparison
by mitchty 14y ago
Would be easy enough to compare prices on windows/linux in a vm on my mac though. And take note of the companies that do it. Something else to add to comparison services as well, aka does site xyz.com discriminate based on os/browser?
- MichaelApproved 14y agoMuch easier to use an user agent switcher plugin while in incognito mode.
- mitchty 14y agoTrue, but user agent switching won't get around someone testing for browser features and ignoring the agent string.
- raverbashing 14y agoplease explain how would you go about detecting linux/windows/mac without agent string (with the exception of detecting Safari/Konqueror/IE) Screen size? Fonts?
- rmc 14y agoIt's much harder, but possible. You could look at browser features in JS and compare them to what's known for browsers to do and guess the browser. Some browsers are highly likely to be certain ODs. It's highly highly likely that they are just looking at user agent strings.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoWell, the code to look at JS features must be written in JS itself (adding features to an array, sending them over JSON, redirecting to a new page, etc.). I'll pull out my Dev Console and fuck with it (set a breakpoint and change that part of the code), and make them think I'm using lynx instead of Safari. So, I don't think you can ever really know what browser your users use.
- lmm 14y agoSure. And even if you could, you couldn't really know whether they like cheap hotels based on it. The question is whether you can get a signal that's statistically well correlated enough to be useful.
- rmc 14y agoActually in this case you could infer they like cheap hotels (or don't like expensive ones). If someone is willing to go to a lot of effort to hide who they are, to hunt for bargains, or check they are getting a good price, they are probably very price sensitive, and would like the cheapest hotel you have, they've shown they are willing to waste their own time to get cheaper prices.
- lmm 14y agoNot reliably. There are plenty of affluent privacy nuts who care a lot about making sure they're not tracked but aren't particularly price-sensitive.
- michaelt 14y agoYou know how web developers are constantly bitching about incompatibilities between web browsers and javascript engines? That's how.
- unreal37 14y agoImportant note: the prices are not different. Just that more 5-star hotels are shown in the search results to Mac users. If they were charging more for the same hotel, it would be evil not brilliant. :)
- bigiain 14y agoWe were doing this back in early 2001 on this site: http://web.archive.org/web/20010722191804/http://travelmall.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010722191804/http://travelmall.... We tried both adjusting individual prices for Mac users (and didn't see any statistical difference from the price sensitivity for non-mac users, same as we didn't see statistically significant differences between older and newer Windows version users), and skewing the search result price range for Mac users compared to non-Mac users (and we certainly saw statistically significant improvements there in terms of average dollars per room-night). In the long run though, although we proved to ourselves it worked, the Mac userbase back then was so small that the overall bottom line effect wasn't big enough compared to the engineering and marketing effort to keep it working - I think it all vanished in the big 2004 rewrite of the site's back end.