topic This is funny: browser used in Community Feedback

This is funny: browser used

Michiel — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 02:18:27 GMT

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

Re: This is funny: browser used

Greg_Deckler — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 14:58:51 GMT

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.

Re: This is funny: browser used

Greg_Deckler — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 15:00:44 GMT

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.