ccing this to .netlib, so the relevant developers read it. .netlib folks, the thread started in .general at 2002-01-06.
Jeremy M. Dolan wrote: > Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7+) Gecko/20020104 > Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.1 (Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20011122 oh, that's stupid. They should just use Mozilla/5.0 (Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20011122 Galeon/1.1 > Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 > Netscape6/6.2 > Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; Nautilus/1.0Final) Gecko/20010901 suboptimal, but conforming. > Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:0.9.7+) Gecko/20011220 via > Smart Cache 0.60 Non-conforming as well. Proxies have their own HTTP header, IIRC. Konqueror is even worse. It uses "Mozilla/5.0" at the beginning, but the rest doesn't follow the spec at all. > That's quite a mishmash, and quite hard to parse for stat generators. Yes. > Proposed Change: remove the rv: in the comment field. The 'revision', or > milestone, is the version of the entire browser suite prodct. As it > indicates the version of a complete product, it should be published > similar > to the Netscape6/ "VendorProductToken". [...] > Sites should not be detecting features in Gecko based browsers from > the rv: field. This is what Gecko/ is for. [...] > "For branded versions of Mozilla, the GeckoVersion should correspond to > the date the code was pulled from mozilla.org, and may not necessarily > correspond to the date portion of the generated BuildID." What, however, if a branch (e.g. 1.x) lives long? 2 versions pulled at the same time, one from the trunk and one from the branch, might differ significantly. And the branch might differ significantly from the code the broke from the trunk. So, I think that this date-based versioning is not very suited for determining features. (In fact, I don't think that *any* version-based system is suited for determining features, but browser should explicitly state, which features they support. But that's an old story.) > Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7+) Gecko/20020104 In Beonex Communicator, I use that field as dumping-ground for human-readable version info, like "Development" for alpha-versions or similar.
