In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself
NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along
with text, and there was much rejoicing.
And behold, then came a new web browser known as "Mozilla", being
short for "Mosaic Killer," but Mosaic was not amused, so the public
name was changed to Netscape, and Netscape called itself Mozilla/1.0
(Win3.1), and there was more rejoicing. And Netscape supported frames,
and frames became popular among the people, but Mosaic did not support
frames, and so came "user agent sniffing" and to "Mozilla" webmasters
sent frames, but to other browsers they sent not frames.
And Netscape said, let us make fun of Microsoft and refer to Windows
as "poorly debugged device drivers," and Microsoft was angry. And so
Microsoft made their own web browser, which they called Internet
Explorer, hoping for it to be a "Netscape Killer". And Internet
Explorer supported frames, and yet was not Mozilla, and so was not
given frames. And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait
for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so
Internet Explorer declared that it was "Mozilla compatible" and began
to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible;
MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all
of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.
And Microsoft sold IE with Windows, and made it better than Netscape,
and the first browser war raged upon the face of the land. And behold,
Netscape was killed, and there was much rejoicing at Microsoft. But
Netscape was reborn as Mozilla, and Mozilla built Gecko, and called
itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1)
Gecko/20020826, and Gecko was the rendering engine, and Gecko was
good. And Mozilla became Firefox, and called itself Mozilla/5.0
(Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; sv-SE; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108
Firefox/1.0, and Firefox was very good. And Gecko began to multiply,
and other browsers were born that used its code, and they called
themselves Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US;
rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040825 Camino/0.8.1 the one, and Mozilla/5.0
(Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008
SeaMonkey/1.0 another, each pretending to be Mozilla, and all of them
powered by Gecko.
And Gecko was good, and IE was not, and sniffing was reborn, and Gecko
was given good web code, and other browsers were not. And the
followers of Linux were much sorrowed, because they had built
Konqueror, whose engine was KHTML, which they thought was as good as
Gecko, but it was not Gecko, and so was not given the good pages, and
so Konquerer began to pretend to be "like Gecko" to get the good
pages, and called itself Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2;
FreeBSD) (KHTML, like Gecko) and there was much confusion.
Then cometh Opera and said, "surely we should allow our users to
decide which browser we should impersonate," and so Opera created a
menu item, and Opera called itself Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0;
Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 9.51, or Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; U; en;
rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061208 Firefox/2.0.0 Opera 9.51, or Opera/9.51
(Windows NT 5.1; U; en) depending on which option the user selected.
And Apple built Safari, and used KHTML, but added many features, and
forked the project, and called it WebKit, but wanted pages written for
KHTML, and so Safari called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac
OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5, and it
got worse.
And Microsoft feared Firefox greatly, and Internet Explorer returned,
and called itself Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)
and it rendered good code, but only if webmasters commanded it to do
so.
And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like
Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be
Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and
WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all
browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0
(Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like
Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was
a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be
everyone else, and confusion abounded.
