CODEWITHSUNDEEP
webkituser-agent
cmplieger
cmplieger

Reputation: 7351

Why does the WebKit user agent contain "mozilla"?

Why in the world is this the webkit user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.27+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.4 Safari/533.20.27

Why not:

Webkit/5.04 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.27+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/533.20.27

Thanks for clearing this up :)

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2167

Answers (2)

Jakub Wieczorek
Jakub Wieczorek

Reputation: 1899

It really is a left over from the early days of Web. Many sites were only compatible with Netscape Navigator, which was the dominant browser at that point, and so what they did was to sniff the User-Agent for the "Mozilla/*" part. When IE showed up, MS wanted those websites to work in their browser as well, so they went for pretending they are Mozilla as well. And so did all the browsers that popped up later on, including WebKit-based ones. And it doesn't seem like that artifact is going away anywhere soon as still many old sites do that type of sniffing and for browsers dropping this convention would probably mean breaking thousands of sites.

Upvotes: 11

PhonicUK
PhonicUK

Reputation: 13864

It's a throwback to the browser wars, the browser is identifying as a 'Mozilla Compatible' agent.

Upvotes: 1

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