4 ms·
The "Mozilla" part of the user agent has been maintained for historical reasons, and could potentially break compatibility if removed. Originally it was used to
by aclimatt 13y ago
The "Mozilla" part of the user agent has been maintained for historical reasons, and could potentially break compatibility if removed. Originally it was used to detect frames. It may not be used in the majority of user agent sniffers these days, but I doubt Microsoft is interested in testing their luck removing it.
http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
- T-hawk 13y agoWe have a real test case. Opera has identified directly as "Opera" not "Mozilla" since forever (unless you configure it otherwise), and at least 95% of websites work fine with it. And of the small minority that do fail in Opera, faulty user agent sniffing could represent only a fraction of those. Opera 12.15 identifies as this for me: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.15 We could lose that historical crufty "Mozilla" and be fine. Opera has shown us the way.
- skrebbel 13y agoSignificantly more than 95%. Opera has been my main browser for the past 5 years, and in the beginning it wasn't all perfect, but I've had 0 problems on at least 99% of sites in the last 3 years. Opera filled the last holes and devs became better. Interestingly, some high-profile applications such as Basecamp still suck in Opera, for no apparent reason.
- kibibu 13y ago> some high-profile applications such as Basecamp still suck in Opera, for no apparent reason That's interesting, and I can see it being potentially self-perpetuating. It's broken because Opera numbers are too low to allocate resources to fix, because nobody uses Opera on their site (more than once) because it's broken, because Opera numbers are too low...