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Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

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Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#31

Post by Gigachad »

DecentShoes wrote: post #21
RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #10

In a similar way: Why was there no Windows 9? [1] [1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/435584/why-windows-10-isnt-n...

[flagged]

There’s also no reason that the public facing name has to be the same as the internal name. They could have called it Windows 9 and internally reported it as anything in the apis.

Its basically standard in software to do this when the actual name for something comes out near the end or changes often so you don’t have to update all the code to reference the new name.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#32

Post by Gigachad »

wolrah wrote: post #15
shmerl wrote: post #3

Really weird and convoluted reasons for it. A better question is why it was never fixed / renamed to proper names.

> A better question is why it was never fixed / renamed to proper names. Because the reason it is the way it is in the first place is compatibility with sites that are doing things objectively wrong already, which makes it really hard to get them to change. The problem is that poorly designed systems limit access or disable features based on a user-agent allowlist, which is never the right answer. There is no right w…

Personally I’d get rid of the user agent entirely. Stop sending it and let sites query available features rather than check the specific browser version.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#33

Post by userbinator »

usr1106 wrote: post #28

Ironically Cloudflare blocks the real Mozilla derived browser on this Linux phone, so I can't access SO anymore. (Turnstile was broken a long time. It finally got fixed half a year ago. Now I note it does not even come up any more, just a static message that I should throw away my phone^W^W^W^W upgrade my browser. No idea whether Cloudflare or SO is to blame.)

No surprise, CF is in bed with Big Browser. There are workarounds but I won't go into detail here since "the walls have ears"; suffice to say that the "bot" scraping companies still have no trouble getting around it.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#34

Post by arp242 »

anamexis wrote: post #24

Has anyone tried running a generic User-Agent on a standard modern browser? (By "generic", I mean one that does away with this whole compatibility dance.) I'm curious how much would break or degrade.

Opera Presto didn't use it, and had a User-Agent like:

  Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux zvav; U; en) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16
Didn't seem to cause that much problems.

It did keep the version at 9.80, presumably because >=10 must have caused problems somewhere.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#35

Post by userbinator »

wvbdmp wrote: post #18
impure wrote: post #6

Mozilla should start charging a licensing fee for starting your user agent with Mozilla/ Money problems solved!

In a way it seems like a classic trademark violation, tricking people (or their servers) into thinking your product is someone else’s. I wonder if there are actual agreements about this these days.

See Sega v. Accolade for a precedent of why that likely won't work.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#36

Post by GuB-42 »

impure wrote: post #6

Mozilla should start charging a licensing fee for starting your user agent with Mozilla/ Money problems solved!

Google would have to pay a lot of licensing fees then...

> Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

It is Mozilla (nope), Linux (yes, in a sense), Android (yes) AppleWebKit (not Apple and not WebKit), KHTML (nope), Gecko (nope), Chrome (yes), Mobile (yes), Safari (nope).

So maybe they owe something to Mozilla, Apple and KDE.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#37

Post by chuckadams »

RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #10

In a similar way: Why was there no Windows 9? [1] [1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/435584/why-windows-10-isnt-n...

An alternate reason that doesn’t require such stretching of credulity around one broken piece of software is that MS already had two products starting with “Windows 9” and that people were likely to confuse them, whether end users or someone updating a catalog.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#38

Post by wombatpm »

wolrah wrote: post #15
shmerl wrote: post #3

Really weird and convoluted reasons for it. A better question is why it was never fixed / renamed to proper names.

> A better question is why it was never fixed / renamed to proper names. Because the reason it is the way it is in the first place is compatibility with sites that are doing things objectively wrong already, which makes it really hard to get them to change. The problem is that poorly designed systems limit access or disable features based on a user-agent allowlist, which is never the right answer. There is no right w…

When my site says Best viewed in Netscape, I mean Netscape Navigator. The rest of the world may have moved on, but static HTML 3.2 with the blink tag is forever.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#39

Post by bigfatkitten »

Gigachad wrote: post #31
DecentShoes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There’s also no reason that the public facing name has to be the same as the internal name. They could have called it Windows 9 and internally reported it as anything in the apis. Its basically standard in software to do this when the actual name for something comes out near the end or changes often so you don’t have to update all the code to reference the new name.

> There’s also no reason that the public facing name has to be the same as the internal name. They could have called it Windows 9 and internally reported it as anything in the apis.

This is what they were doing at the time anyway.

Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 was 6.2, Windows 8.1 was 6.3.

Re: Why do all browsers' user agents start with "Mozilla/"? (2008)

#40

Post by brunoarueira »

impure wrote: post #6

Mozilla should start charging a licensing fee for starting your user agent with Mozilla/ Money problems solved!

One of the comments from the accepted answer says that the Mozilla was the codename for Netscape, link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1114254/why-do-all-brows...
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