[PLUG-TALK] Outlook Web Access using a Mozilla User Agent?

Russell Johnson russ at dimstar.net
Sat Aug 7 00:27:36 UTC 2010


On Aug 6, 2010, at 5:25 AM, Richard C. Steffens wrote:

> Russell Johnson wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Aug 5, 2010, at 6:54 PM, Richard C. Steffens wrote:
>> 
>>> At work I use Outlook Web Access for e-mail. I was noodling around settings and such this afternoon and found this:
>>> 
>>> User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)
>>> 
>>> Seems strange for an XP system.
>> 
>> What seems strange to you?
> 
> That MS is using Mozilla as  a user agent.

It's been that way since MSIE 4.0, released in 1997, so about 13 years. 

But, it's not really the Mozilla user agent. The "compatible" keyword means it's not mozilla, but a compatible user agent. Of course, we all know how compatible IE is with Netscape. Mozilla 4.0 was the user agent for Netscape Communicator 4.

I find this statement interesting:

"Note: It is unclear if the Mozilla version will ever change as IE continues to develop, because it now has little meaning (it can’t be used reliably to determine anything)."

More information is available here: http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2010/01/12/history-of-the-user-agent-string/

Russ
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