[thelist] Netscape 4/5/6 - who's on first or who's down for t he count?

Means, Eric D eric.d.means at boeing.com
Tue Jun 4 10:35:01 CDT 2002


>  -----Original Message-----
> From: 	Bill Mason [mailto:evolt at accessibleinter.net]
> Sent:	Tuesday, June 04, 2002 10:21 AM
> To:	thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject:	Re: [thelist] Netscape 4/5/6 - who's on first or who's down
for the count?
>
> At 03:57 AM 06/04/2002, Sharon F. Malone wrote:
> >So could I "safely" count Netscape 5 results in with the results for
> >Netscape 6?
>
> I would say so.  Any report showing Netscape 5 has more likely
> misidentified Netscape 6 rather than actually had a visitor using a
> pre-Mozilla "Netscape 5 beta".

Mozilla 1.0RC3 reports the following UA string (on Win2k, obviously):
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc3) Gecko/20020523

For contrast, Netscape 4.77 reports thusly:
Mozilla/4.77 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)

It's entirely probable that anything reported as "Netscape 5" is actually a
misidentified Mozilla build; since older versions of Netscape reported
themselves *only* as "Mozilla", there's no easy way to differentiate, but I
would (and do) take anything reported as Mozilla/Netscape with a version of
5.0 or greater as a Gecko-based browser.  Netscape 5 betas are pretty rare;
I don't think I've ever actually seen one, and they'd be rarer still at this
point.



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