Mama Cass Elliot wrote:
> In netscape.public.mozilla.seamonkey the people heard say these wise
> words:
>
>
>>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
>>
>
> Why don't we just call it "Gecko 1.0"?
If the world wasn't full of people writing bad browser detection code
that assumes the presence of Mozilla/x.y where x >= 4 then I'd agree.
and as all Mozilla releases upto now include Mozilla/5.0 and a
Gecko/date string then that convention should be kept.
> After all, it's using a different rendering engine from N4.x and from IE,
> and isn't that what the websites are wanting to know - what rendering
> engine (and what version thereof) is going to decode their webpages?
You'd think so. But thanks to Microsoft who decided that all their
browsers were gonna call themselves Mozilla/ so that pages designed for
Netscape would display with all their Netscape specific features (e.g.
frames), now the Mozilla/ identifier is expected in a lot of dodgy
browser sniffing code. Fortunately we also have the Gecko/ string in our
user agent so people can detect gecko based browsers.
A good reason to have both Mozilla/ and Gecko in the user agent is also
because Gecko is only one component of mozilla, it's possible to have a
browser that uses Gecko but doesn't use the Mozilla XPFE and therefore
doesn't have some of the features of mozilla, e.g. skins.
> That seems to be self evident to me.
>
