Judson Valeski wrote: > Daniel Veditz wrote: > >>Frankly I don't know why sites set "Mozilla/5.0" in stone, Netscape released >>all manner of "Mozilla/4.xx" versions without causing problems. > > We determined that the evangelism effort to get all the sites that do > poor/broken UA string parsing, to fix themselves [...]
Yeah, I know why *we* aren't going to change it, I just don't get how sites are so stupid after years of changing 4.x user agents. >>I've elsewhere >>proposed (bug 65764) that it'd be more accurate and in keeping with the spec >>to do something like "Gecko/20010904.45" (45 days into a branch started Sept >>4th). >> > Interesting thought. However, there's still some ambiguity, namely "a > branch"; which branch on that date? No more ambiguity than the current Gecko token. *which* 20020107 build? The 4am auto build? the 10-11am usual nightly? the 4pm after-carpool build? Less ambiguity in practice: long-lived release branches are rare enough, having two on one day hasn't happened yet and likely never will. Branch overhead is too great to be supporting two branches that are essentially the same thing. >>Well, not "Seamonkey". That was Netscape's codename for 6.0 and has a bit of >>a bad taste around here (as does this newsgroup's name). I'd still rather >>make it "Mozilla/5.0.9.7+" or some variant, though. >> > "Mozilla/5.0.9.7.+" will break too many sites unfortunately. We tried > adding dots and numbers, even non-digits; all fell on their faces. It also violates the spec which would encourage something more like "5.097", although what we'd do when we hit 0.9.10 could get interesting. "5.09A" (hex, or base-36) is one option, but then it looks kinda like a 5.09 alpha. But not worth too much brainpower figuring out since "5.0" looks here to stay. -Dan Veditz
