First you must understand the meaning user-agent, or the user’s agent, or whatever acts/interacts.
In general, it is necessary to know what kind of functionality is compatible with that agent, to then make the content available in an interpretable way to the same, and it is hence the confusion with the repeated Mozilla begins.
The first web browser, launched in 1993, was the Mosaic, and used it user-agent: NCSA_Mosaic/2.0
.
To Mosaic Communications, responsible for the browser, became Netscape Communications, and created the Netscape Navigator, which was originally called Mozilla (a joke at the English junction of Mosaic and Killer - Killer of the Mosaic), and therefore his user-agent era Mozilla/1.0
.
Like the browser of Netscape inserted interpretations for new functionalities, such as frames, the web servers began to provide pages with the new features, but needed to maintain compatibility with the old Mosaic, so they restricted the new pages to the agents they contained Mozilla, sending the old page, compatible with the Mosaic, to those who had not.
When the Microsoft created the Internet Explorer, launched in 1995, this had support for frames and other functionalities of Netscape, but your user-agent did not contain Mozilla, which caused the servers to return poor content, interpreting it as Mosaic. 8
Impatient to wait for the administrators became aware of their new navigator, who appropriated the name, and started sending the user-agent Mozilla/1.22
, declaring itself compatible with the agent Mozilla. 10
Thus, user agent has the function of specifying compatibilities, and is used in this way until today, saying that it is compatible with Mozilla, or with KHTML like Gecko
to show support for Gecko, and browsers Android posing as Safari. 14 15
Note that this is unrelated to the non-profit organisation Mozilla, responsible for Firefox.
This answer is wrong. IE does not use Gecko and has this string as user-agent. The same goes for Chrome, Opera and Safari, just to stay in the main ones.
– Maniero
So why does this show up @bigown?
– Wallace Maxters
@Wallacemaxters is in my answer
– Maniero