422930 - User-agent String Begins with Legacy "Mozilla" Prefix Instead of "Firefox"

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[user2037]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

User-agent strings should begin with the most specific name. In 2008 it seems really odd that "Mozilla/" is still prefixing user agent identifiers. Even "Mozilla Firefox/" would be better.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to "about:"
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

Expected Results:  
Firefox/2.0.0.12 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201

Opera's user-agent string is much clearer: "Opera/9.25 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)".

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

The name 'Mozilla/5.0' is not the name of the browser, it's the name of the platform. And it's still at 5.0 for legacy reasons. The browser is mentioned at the end.

Besides, this would break every use-agent detection code that exists.

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

Oh, by the way, even Internet Explorer uses the Mozilla prefix :

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.0.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

Comment 3

[user2037]

Since FF3 is a major change I would hope that legacy quirks would be removed.

Every change to the user-agent string breaks some browser sniffer code. Removing dishonest identifiers would only encourage better browser sniffing code.

IE should have never used "Mozilla/" and Microsoft would probably admit that today. IE identifying itself as "Mozilla/" in 2008 is really sad.

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

verified wontfix, there is no need to change the UA, the platform and the Gecko version matters, we could/should remove the Firefox part of the UA because it doesn't matter.