h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So if Mozilla is "new" still to be version one (BTW writing this in last nights build) why when I look at my server logs do I get entries like

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011128 Netscape6/6.2.1

and

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0)

Which I read as Netscape 6.2.1 on Win NT 5 (ie Win 2000) and IE5.5 on NT 4.

So what does the Mozilla/4.0 and mozilla/5.0 mean?/

Cheers

CH

I'm not sure, to be honest, but I have come across this as well.
I'm guessing it's some consequence of the history of browsers in general - for instance, if you go into IE's "about" box, it says "based on NCSA Mosaic".
My guess is the server logging systems label this basis of the technology as "Mozilla", and use it to show the "generation" of the browser (IE and NN both reached 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 at similar times with similar features).
As I say, just a guess, but a vaguely informed one!

[IMSoP]

In case anyone curious comes across this, I do now know the answer to this quandary (or, at the very least, an alleged answer).

Apparently, the very first version of Netscape was released as "Mozilla", and therefore reported itself to web-servers as such. Now, at the time, it was very much the "in" browser, and since the web was still full of geeks at the time, that meant a lot. So the story is, that people set their web-servers up to serve the best content only to those users running Mozilla. Of course, they only knew this from what the browser told them, so rival browsers began reporting themselves as Mozilla anyway, so that their users wouldn't have to miss out.

The tradition has carried on ever since, and has resulted in all graphical browsers (most, if not all, of which are based on Mosaic originally) beginning their version string with the word "Mozilla". Which until recently was fine, because there was no such thing - but is a little more confusing now...

[IMSoP]