You're entirely right, and it's not just browsers. Your statement about 'user agents' was the better one. Consider also curl (http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html#-L) (and presumably libcurl), Python's requests (https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/blob/master/request...) library, Python's urllib.request (http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/urllib.request.html#urlli...) (what used to be urllib2), the list goes on. I don't believe I've ever seen a HTTP client library that doesn't do 301 method conversion.