I propose the following for Mozilla user agent strings (I'll give my reasons below): Mozilla 1.0 should be released with the user-agent string Mozilla/5.1 and subsequent releases should be names similarly: Mozilla/5.11 for release 1.1, 5.12 for 1.2, Mozilla/5.2 for moz 2.0, etc Mozilla/6.0 could come at a later date if there's a big enough change to warrant moving up a major version number. The only proposal I've seen on user agent strings was back in the time when they expected the Mozilla release to be called 5.0, The version number that's currently in brackets (X11; U; Linux xxxx; en-us; 0.8.1) was meant to be the pre release field and only be in pre release versions. Mozilla/5.x was meant to represent the versions. Here's my reasons: 1. Currently Netscape 4.x and below actively invcrement the version field of the user agent with each new release Mozilla/4.77 is Netscape 4.77. Therefore it's unlikely to break any browser that's sniffing for Mozilla/5 2. Major changes were checked in for XUL syntax and the XUL mime type. There needs to be a way to distinguish browsers released at version 0.6 (e.g. Netscape 6) with newer browsers. As we don't want people doing browser sniffing on the vendor specific part of the user-agent string then incrementing the Mozilla/5.version makes the most sense. Remember Mozilla and Netscape 6 have a translate function in the view menu. This serves some remote XUL to Mozilla. This sends to old mime type and XUL syntax so that it works in Netscape 6. I'm sure the vendors want to ensure Netscape 6 still works while supporting Mozilla 1.0 and NS 6.5, therefore searching for Mozilla/5.1 user agent will indicate that the new mime type and syntax should be sent. 3. It encourages people who sniff for browsers (whether or not they should or not, we can't stop them), to use the Mozilla/bit of the UA string rather than the vendor supplied Netscape6/ bit (assuming that Netscape 6 is going to be the most popular distribution of Mozilla). If Mozilla/ increments with each version then people will use that for version sniffing, if it stays the same then people are likely to sniff on the Netscape/ paart of the string which will break Mozilla and other non-netscape releases. 4. We've been on Mozilla/5.0 for too long now, I've been using browsers with /5.0 as their user agent since 1998 - mozClassic used /5.0 so moving to 5.1 makes the clean break away from that codebase (in the unlikely event someone wanted to suppot mozclassic!!!). OK ignore reason 4 :)
