CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-mvcasp.net-mvc-3internet-exploreruser-agent
Don Tomato
Don Tomato

Reputation: 3519

Why I am getting 'Mozilla' for IE?

Today I installed IE 11 with windows update.

I make a request using IE, but Request.Browser.Browser returns 'Mozilla'. Why?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 668

Answers (2)

fuxia
fuxia

Reputation: 63556

User agent sniffing is bad for users and indirectly for browser vendors too. That’s why vendors try to find ways around this anti-pattern. In IE this started with version 9, when the User-Agent string was frozen to make the life for caching proxies easier.

Besides caching proxies, the more important problem are outdated scripts. IE 11 is better than IE 10, so it shouldn’t receive content prepared for IE 10. Since Microsoft cannot fix every old sniffing script out in the web, it had to find a way around the algorithms by changing the UA string again.

The new regular UA string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

In Compatibility View the UA string is:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C)

Opera made a similar decision for Opera 15+, which doesn’t use Presto as rendering engine anymore. Its new UA string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.52 Safari/537.36 OPR/15.0.1147.100

The version number after OPR/ indicates the actual Opera version, but there is no match for Opera anymore.

Please do not just adjust the sniffing scripts. You cannot win that race. Use client side feature detection instead whenever possible.

Upvotes: 2

benka
benka

Reputation: 4742

For historical reasons, Internet Explorer identifies itself as a Mozilla browser.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ms537503.aspx

Upvotes: 1

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