317492 - Many browsers using "Mozilla" in their UA string

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Marketing :: Trademark Violations, task)

Description

[Nicholas Shanks]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/416.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/416.12
Build Identifier: 

Here are just a few companies/browsers that are violating the Mozilla trademark. A sample UA identifier string is shown for each user agent.

Microsoft Internet Explorer:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; (R1 1.1); .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

Apple Safari:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/416.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/416.12

Opera S.A. Opera:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; fr) Opera 8.50

Yahoo Slurp:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

Google Googlebot:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Ask Jeeves/Tehoma:
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma; +http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/tech_crawling.html)

Become.com Becomebot:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BecomeBot/2.3; MSIE 6.0 compatible; +http://www.become.com/site_owners.html)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is not a trademark violation, in the same way that the line in your OpenOffice "Save As..." dialog box which says ".doc (Microsoft Word 97/XP/2000)" is not a trademark violation.

This practice has been going on for a decade; attempting to stop it would be pointless and counterproductive.

Gerv