SillyDog701 Message Centre

[keith]

Hey I was wondering why in my user agent is says mozillia 4.0. I am not running Mozillia, so how come it comes up?
thanks
Keith

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

---

KEITH

[Al]

The earliest example of this is Internet Explorer's use of a User-Agent string beginning "Mozilla/<version> (compatible; MSIE <version>...", in order to receive content intended for Netscape Navigator, its main rival at the time of its development. It should be stressed that this is not a reference to the open-source Mozilla browser, which was developed much later, but to the original codename for Navigator, which was also the name of the Netscape company mascot. This format of User-Agent string has since been copied by other user agents, partly because Explorer, in turn, came to dominate.

More recently, with Internet Explorer becoming by far the dominant browser, rivals such as Opera and Safari implemented systems whereby the user could select a false User-Agent string to send, such as that of a recent version of Explorer. This, of course, leads to a string containing three names and versions: first, the user agent claims to be "Mozilla" (i.e. Netscape Navigator); then, "MSIE" (Internet Explorer); and finally, the actual browser, such as "Opera".
~Info from Wikipedia

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

---

User of Firefox 3.0 on Windows XP

[Andrew T.]

Originally, Mozilla was the code name of Netscape, so versions of Netscape Navigator and Communicator 4.8 and below would generate a user agent sting like this:

Mozilla/4.79 [en] (Win95; U)

Which is Netscape Communicator 4.79 running under Windows 95.

When Microsoft Internet Explorer was in its infancy, most web content was developed for Netscape. So, Microsoft made the dubious move of identifying itself as Mozilla in its user agent.

Internet Explorer 1.x/2.x, 3.0x, and 4.0x and higher respectively identify themselves as being "Mozilla/1.22 compatible," "Mozilla/2.0 compatible," and "Mozilla/4.0 compatible" in their user agents. Why? Because Netscape 1.22, 2.0, and 4.0 were the most popular or current browsers at the time these respective IE versions were released.

And why bother using a browser that's merely Mozilla "compatible" when you can use the real thing?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

[keith]

Thanks guys

Keith

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

---

KEITH