Gavin Long wrote:
>>Is the new Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 preview release
>>based on Mozilla 4.0? I had an error while connecting with
>>IE6 to IIS on my Windows 2000 machine, and IE reported the
>>browser as Mozilla 4.0 (IE 6.0 compatable), or something
>>like that in the error report.
>>
>
> No it isn't.
>
> Many browsers identify themselves as "mozilla" something-or-other in order
> to cope with poor browser sniffing code.
>
> In this context, IE6 is pretending to be Netscape 4.
>
Yeah this is the case. Mozilla was originally Netscape's codename for
their browser and as the Mozilla project started off with the release of
the Netscape source code of the forthcoming Netscape 5.0 product (which
was scrapped and Mozilla totally rewritten) the Mozilla project adopted
the name as its own. So in this case Mozilla has nothing to do with the
project.
The reason IE pretends to be Netscape is mainly for very old browser
sniffing code because when IE first hit the scene Netscape was the only
browser that could handle frames so many sites would only serve up
framed pages to Netscape users. For some crazy reason Microsoft wanted
their users to share the joy of framed sites and so instead of hoping
that people would change their browser sniffing code to accomodate a
browser with such little market share as IE (there was a time when very
few would use it) they just changed their user agent to contain Mozilla
so it looked like a Netscape.
