145529 - New Mozilla user-agent standard

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Derek Petersen]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020510

I think it would be a good idea to have a new Mozilla user-agent standard.

For example, instead of:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020510

you could have:

Mozilla/1.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4; en-US) Gecko/20020510

Some of us could also push the IE developers to change their useragent  from
something like:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)

to

MSIE/5.5 (Windows 98)

I see no sense in having a wrong version number for everything just because a
decade ago browsers faked their user-agent as Mozilla and a few people's
homepages that haven't been updated in 5 years might still use a bad method of
detecting the browser.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Mozilla/5.0 is correct because we want to be compatible with the Netscape UA.
Mozilla is a complete rewrite but it contains a few pieces of code from NS4.X
and Mozilla/5.0 is correct...
And we need the RV string for many things... (branch or trunk builds....)

And i don't think MS will change their UA because it will break many pages !

->wontfix

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

For what it's worth, there is a lot of discussion on this in the newsgroup
archives. Please read that before reopening, since you will need to be able to
explain why the decision that was reached is wrong.