Why does the IE user agent string start with Mozilla?

Does Mozilla have anything to do with Trident?

 

Interesting.

Wasn't IE not even around when Netscape came out, though?

 

Mozilla was the development name for Netscape Navigator, circa 1994. The name was a portmanteau of " Mosaic killer" and "God zilla." NCSA Mosaic was the emerging browser leader, though it was largely entrenched in the academic market. Netscape was formed to commercialize Mosaic for the consumer market. The portmanteau is a bit amusing considering many of the Mosaic authors from NCSA worked on Navigator at Netscape.

As noted, other browsers began using "Mozilla" in the UA string to be served HTML designed for Netscape Navigator, which included support for such wonderful non-standard tags such as < BLINK> and < LAYER>.

In 1995 Microsoft bought a variant of Mosaic, developed by Spyglass in a licensing deal with NCSA, and rebranded it as Microsoft Internet Explorer. Not until version 7 of MSIE, did Microsoft completely rewrite the source code, completely removing all traces of its Spyglass Mosaic origins.

Prior to the 1998 AOL acquisition, Netscape open-sourced the Communicator Suite (including Navigator) source code in hopes of creating a new Mozilla Application Suite maintained by the newly formed Mozilla Organization. Version 4 of the Netscape Communicator Suite had started losing significant market share due to feature bloat/creep and strong competition from Microsoft Internet Explorer. Ultimately the Communicator source-code was dropped in favor of new code developed for MAS.

Netscape Navigator 6 & 7 were released using branches of the MAS source code featuring the new Gecko rendering engine. Feature bloat crept back in and by 2003 the newly formed Mozilla Foundation announced their intention to develop a standalone browser based on the Mozilla Suite source code. That browser, initially named Phoenix became Firebird then Mozilla Firebird and finally Mozilla Firefox. All the while, the UA string continued to carry the "Mozilla" term, in part due to the parent Mozilla Organization/Foundation but also for historical server compatibility.

With the rise and widespread adherence to HTML standards, the need to maintain Mozilla compatibility is little more than a historical throwback. However it does make for a neat history lesson. ;-)

--L.

 

Bumping because I never knew this and this is nifty to know.

 

it's just a mess

History of the user-agent string | NCZOnline

btw, indrek. marquee works in chrome, too.. your text is moving around a least..

 

Interesting stuff guys, thanks. I've wondered forever.