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Michiel's avatar
Michiel
Icon for Resolver III rankResolver III
11 years ago

This is funny: browser used

I was looking at my profile (on IE11) and the 'browser used at last visit' entry says 'Mozilla/5.0'. What?

2 Replies

  • Greg_Deckler's avatar
    Greg_Deckler
    Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion

    Here you go:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5125438/why-do-chrome-and-ie-put-mozilla-5-0-in-the-user-agent-they-send-to-the-server

     

    http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

     

     

     

    It all goes back to browser sniffing and making sure that the browsers are not blocked from getting content they can support. From the above article:

    And Internet Explorer supported frames, and yet was not Mozilla, and so was not given frames. And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.

  • Greg_Deckler's avatar
    Greg_Deckler
    Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion

    I've seen the same thing using Edge. I believe it is really a compatibility test that is going on, is the browser Mozilla/5.0 compatible and if it is, that is what is displayed. I've seen that on a lot of sites.