UA string.

[Vadim Plessky]

On Friday 21 February 2003 05:03, Dawit A. wrote:
|  On Thursday 20 February 2003 19:33, Darin Adler wrote:
|  > On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at 04:05 PM, Dirk Mueller wrote:
|  > > I guess we should change our to
|  > >
|  > > Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; KHTML, like Gecko; Linux)
|  > >
|  > > But thats not really compatible to your format.
|  >
|  > Might be OK. We the key is that they can just look for the substring
|  > KHTML.
|
|  This will break all the sites that are currently looking for
|  konqueror/major.minor, however small in number they may be :(

Frankly speaking, I do not see any reason *why* Gecko word should be listed in 
Konqueror or Safari UA string.

In any case, such variant
 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; KHTML, not Gecko; Linux)
looks like better to me. I don't like word "like", "not" is better in this 
case.

|
|  > > Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko)
|  >
|  > Seems as good as the above, not a lot better though. I guess they can
|  > look for "(KHTML," in this one, which might be better.
|
|  And keeps compatibility with what some sites are already looking for.
|
[...]
|  >
|  > > Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; U; Linux; en-us) KHTML/3.1 like Gecko
|  >
|  > That's more like us, but has the problem that "compatible" is going to
|  > make many simple-minded sites think you are IE; we found that led to
|  > bad results.
|
|  Ironic.  IIRC IE used the word "compatible" to indicate that it was
| compatible with "Mozilla" since it choose to use that word to start its
| user-agent string when it should have known better.  Knowing them more as a
| ploy for more market share I am sure. Now "compatible" is associated with
| IE ? Oh well. A correct expression for us would have been:
|
|  Konqueror/major.minor (Linux 2.4.19; en-us; X11) like Gecko
|  KHTML/major.minor (Linux; en-us; X11) like Gecko

Mozilla was started as *engine* sitting below actual browser (Netscape or 
Mozilla browser itself).
So, Mozilla/5.0 or Mozilla/4.0 exactly identifies browser version/engine 
generation.
But this has been broken with MS IE itroduction and its policy to fake almost 
everything in order tobe compatible with Netscape.

userAgent strings like:

KHTML/major.minor (Linux; Konqueror/major.minor; en-us; X11) 
and
KHTML/major.minor (MacOS X; Safari/major.minor; en-us) 

are indeed very close to being perfect, and explain quite well nature of 
rendering engine, and browser itself.
besides, such UA would consolidate Konqueror and Safari UA strings in logs, 
allowing to achieve bigger marketshare

|
|  But since that would break many sites:
|
|  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; konqueror/major.minor) KHTML/3.1 like Gecko
|

It's better to move KHTML "in", like:
  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; konqueror/major.minor; KHTML/3.1; X11) 

Open points are:
* platform listing (Linux; MacOS X; FreeBSD, etc.)
* indication of windowing environment it is running in ( X11; Windows; OS X)
* support for plugins/extended mimetypes

(see my previous mail for details)

|  is the best choice we have IMHO.
|
|  > > BTW, do you happen to know the meaning of the "U;" ? :-)
|  >
|  > I do not. I am preparing a document explaining our user agent string
|  > that might some day go up on developer.apple.com, and that's one of the
|  > unanswered questions in my current draft.
|
|  U means strong security.  It along with I - weak security and N - no
| security are meant to describe how strong the crypto module you choose to
| install in Netscape was.  I see it has been carried over to Mozilla as well
| (See the above link).  However, I have not seen any other major browser use
| this classification to describe strong security. Most webservers do
| actually preform the SSL handshake in order to determine the level (SSLv2/
| SSLv3) and strength of the cipher you are using (128-bit key).  So for the
| most part and IMHO this is a useless feature specific to Netscape. I could
| be wrong about its usefullness of course...
|
|  Regards,
|  Dawit A.

-- 

Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons * BlueSphere Icons 0.3.0 released
http://svgicons.sourceforge.net