Mozilla Poised for Revival?

MarkedMan writes "An interesting and fairly lengthy CNET article on Mozilla and the pending 1.0 release. Kind of shallow research, making some common mistakes (Like many others, he half implies that AOL picking Mozilla as the default browser automatically puts 35 million users in the Netscape camp.) Good to see this getting some fairly mainline press."

Comments

AOL Using Mozilla/Netscape

[Grasshopper]

I've seen a lot of comments that seem to totally discard any significance coming from AOL using Mozilla as the base of its browser.

If nothing else, this seems particularly important to me because it will force more Web developers to stop using IE as a test browser.

With the poorest standards compliance of all browsers, this has created a flood of these "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer" pages, because they write THML, Javascript, etc. that is broken.

Now, if these broken Web sites are revealed as such by a larger audience, we could see some improvements in the overall quality, because something tells me the typical AOL user will happily complain about anything. :)

Re:AOL Using Mozilla/Netscape

[Digitalia]

Yet, if the majority continues to use Internet Explorer, those who do use Mozilla will consider their browser to be the one defying standards. Though we try and impose ideals on software and hwardware, the only true standards come about when the majority of users embrace a certain idea. In this case, Microsoft has the ability to establish "standards" because of superior market share.

but they do not know that

[stego]

It has been my experience that a great percentage of AOL users simply do not know that they can use any browser other than 'AOL'. They do not think of it as a browser, but an application called 'AOL'. ('How can you run AOL in Internet Explorer?' 'Can it run in Word, too?')

Using Mozilla everywhere

[steveha]

I use Mozilla or Galeon everywhere now. Some web sites detect which browser you are using, and if they don't see "IE" or "Netscape" they won't let you in.

So I have changed my user agent string, and both Mozilla and Galeon now claim to be Netscape 4.0. Given how buggy and crash-prone 4.0 was, everyone is using 4.7x if they are really using Netscape, so "Netscape 4.0" ought to be a red flag in a server log.

Here is my user agent string for Mozilla:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Mozilla 0.9.9; Debian GNU/Linux;)

So there is at least a chance that if webmasters look at the server logs, they can see that I'm actually using Mozilla. If they just use scripts to tally what browsers have visited their sites, and the scripts ignore the "compatible" remark, my visits will show up as Netscape 4.0... oh well, no trick is perfect.

Here is what you put into prefs.js to set the user agent string this way:

user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Mozilla 0.9.9; Debian GNU/Linux;)")

Mozilla can handle every web site I care about, if it can get in. This trick lets it in.

Maybe Mozilla should have a feature that lets you set the user agent string on a per-site basis! That way we could be leaving "Mozilla" in the logs on most sites, and only lying to the sites that won't let Mozilla in.

steveha