Browser user-agent history

In the beginning was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called himself NCSA_Mosaic / 2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic showed pictures with text, and happiness came.



And then came the new web browser, known as “Mozilla”, which was the abbreviation for “Mosaic Killer” (“Mosaic Slayer”), but Mosaic did not like it, so the name was changed to Netscape and Netscape called itself Mozilla / 1.0 ( Win3.1), and there was no more happiness. And Netscape supported frames and frames became popular among the people, but Mosaic did not support frames, and therefore it was time to sniff out user agents, and webmasters sent frames to Mozilla, but did not send them to other browsers.

And Netscape said, let's laugh at Microsoft and referred to Windows as “poorly debugged device drivers”, and Microsoft was angry. And Microsoft made its own web browser, which they called Internet Explorer, hoping that it would be a “Netscape killer”. And Internet Explorer supported frames, but was not Mozilla, and therefore did not receive frames. But Microsoft grew impatiently and did not want to wait for webmasters to learn IE and start sending frames to it, and therefore Internet Explorer stated that it was “Mozilla-compatible” and became the epitome of Netscape, and called itself Mozilla / 1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and everyone at Microsoft was happy, but the webmasters were confused.
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And Microsoft sold IE to Windows, and made it better than Netscape, and the first browser war raged on the ground. And now Netscape was killed, and there was a lot of joy in the camp of Microsoft. But Netscape was revived as Mozilla and Mozilla Gecko was created, and he called himself Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; Windows NT 5.0; EN-US; RV: 1.1) Gecko / 20020826, and Gecko was the rendering engine, and Gecko was good. And Mozilla became Firefox, and called itself Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; Windows NT 5.1; SV-SE; RV: 1.7.5) Gecko / 20041108 Firefox / 1.0 and Firefox was very good. And Gecko began to multiply, and other browsers were born that used its code, and they called themselves Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; EN-US; RV: 1.7.2) Gecko / 20040825 Camino / 0.8. 1 and Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; Windows NT 5.1; DE; RV: 1.8.1.8) Gecko / 20071008 SeaMkey / 1.0, each pretending to be Mozilla, and all of them were created based on Gecko.

And Gecko was good, but IE was not, and sniffing was revived, and Gecko received good code, and other browsers did not. And the Linux followers were very sad because they created Konqueror, whose engine was KHTML, which they thought was good, like Gecko, but it was not Gecko and therefore did not get good pages, and so Konquerer began to pretend to be " like Gecko "to get good pages, and called himself Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; Konqueror / 3.2; FreeBSD) (KHTML, like Gecko) and the confusion increased.

Then Opera came and said: “Of course, we have to let our users decide which browser we should impersonate,” and Opera created the menu item, and Opera called itself Mozilla / 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 9.51, or Mozilla / 5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; U; EN; RV: 1.8.1) Gecko / 20061208 Firefox / 2.0.0 Opera 9.51, or Opera / 9.51 (Windows NT 5.1; EN) depending on the option chosen by the user .

And Apple created Safari, and it used KHTML, but many functions were added, and the project was split in two, and they called it WebKit, but he wanted to get pages written for KHTML, and Safari called himself Mozilla / 5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit / 85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari / 85.5, and it got worse.

And Microsoft was very afraid of Firefox, and Internet Explorer returned, and called itself Mozilla / 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0), and it rendered good code, but only when webmasters ordered it to be done.

And then they created Google Chrome and Chrome used WebKit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages created for Safari, and therefore pretended that it is Safari. And so Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla / 5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en- US) AppleWebKit / 525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome / 0.2.149.27 Safari / 525.13 and the user-agent became a complete mess, not lying next to the convenience, and each one was pretending to be different, and the confusion abounded. And chaos reigned on earth.