Re: [spr28609] Allegroserve ***** CANCEL PREVIOUS MESSAGE *****

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 22:34:57 -0800, JP Massar <[email protected]> wrote:

> Sorry about that.  I was retrieving :agent instead of :user-agent.
>
> It returns something non-nil, but rather bizzare for IE.
>
> IE:
>
> Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
>
> Mozilla:
>
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
>
> Anyone have the faintest idea why IE 6.0 running on Windows XP would
> produce a value in this slot that starts with the string 'Mozilla' ?

That's correct and that's how IE announces itself. The very first
commercial Netscape browser was internally called "Mozilla" and at
times when Netscape had 80% or more market share many web site
designers "optimized" their pages for Netscape's Navigator (meaning
they used some non-standard features). They often checked whether the
browser announced itself as "Mozilla" in order to redirect other
browsers to, er, lesser pages.

That's why most other browser vendors copied Netscape's features and
made their user agent string to be something like

  Mozilla/x.y (compatible; ...)

I don't know if I got all the details right but that's basically the
story.

Cheers,
Edi.