Every browser prefix on the market now starts with Mozilla. Is that why? What exactly does Mozilla mean? Today I’m here to unlock his secrets.

Netscape era

You all know that Netscape released the first commercial browser, Netscape Navigator1, in 1994. It set off the rocket of history, and since then, the development of computer networks has opened a new chapter. Its founder, Marc Andreessen, is known in Silicon Valley as the man who started the Internet.

The project was codenamed Mozilla within Netscape at the time, which is one reason all commercial browser prefixes are derived from Mozilla. What does it mean? It stands for Mosaic Killer. It wants to kill Mosaic. What is Mosaic?

While a student at the University of Illinois, Marc Andreessen worked in his spare time at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and led the development of Mosaic, a Unix-based browser that quickly went viral and was used by millions of people, just as he graduated from college in 1993. After graduation, HE went to Silicon Valley, the hot land of the United States at that time, and met Jim Clark, the founder of SIG. Unlike Anderson in his youth, Clark had rich experience in computer business, and he was keenly aware of the commercial value of Mosaic.

The two men started Mosaic communications in 1993 and were soon sued by the University of Illinois, which is why the internal code name for Netscape Navigator at the time was Mosaic Killer.

In 1994, Netscape Navigator1 was released, Mozilla, whose navigator. UserAgent begins with Mozilla.

On August 19, 1996 ** (remember this date **) Netscape Navigator3 successfully surpassed Mosaic as the most popular browser, and on January 7, 1997, NCSA announced that it would stop maintaining Mosaic, so Mozilla succeeded in fulfilling its promise.

It was navigator. UserAgent

Mozilla / 3.0 (small subsidiary; U)Copy the code

Microsoft era

The popularity of Mosaic and the success of Netscape Navigator attracted a host of investors, including Microsoft, a giant.

In 1995, Microsoft bought Spyglass, a browser-making company, for $2 million. The company had licensed the technology and trademark from NCSA to develop its own web browser, but it never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft renamed it Internet Explorer, which was Internet Explorer 1.0,

On August 13, 1996, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0, which was a completely separate technology from Spyglass, a complete rewrite, and the first major browser to support CSS technology. It introduces support for content metadata from ActiveX controls, Java applets, internal web multimedia, and the Internet Content Selection Platform system.

When Internet Explorer 3.0 was released, Netscape Navigator2 was already the most popular browser in the market, and many servers deliberately checked navigator.userAgent before returning to a web page. So Microsoft was smart enough to add Netscape compatible userAgent strings to navigator. UserAgent.

The format is:

Mozilla / 2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.02; Windows 95) // Netscape Navigator2 was Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE Version; Operating System)Copy the code

IE successfully gained user trust by modifying navigator. UserAgent to disguise itself as Netscape Navigator.

This is the reason why Microsoft IE3 userAgent doesn’t start with Mozilla/3.0, which was popular at that time.

On August 19, 1996, Netscape released Netscape Navigator3 six days after IE3 was released, not because Microsoft didn’t want to, but because Netscape had not yet released Netscape Navigator3

The following are the userAgent versions of Internet Explorer

/ / IE4 Mozilla / 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows 98) // IE6 Mozilla/4.0 (Compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) // IE7 Mozilla/4.0 (Compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1) // IE8, added rendering engine version number Trident Mozilla/4.0 (Compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0) // IE8, Mozilla/4.0 (Compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0) // IE9 updates Trident Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident / 5.0)Copy the code

As you can see from the above code, the Mozilla/5.0 request header has not changed since Internet Explorer 9. Why?

Gecko typesetting engine

As Microsoft’s business strategy was successful, its ecological advantage led to the rapid growth of Internet Explorer. Apple announced the use of Internet Explorer for the MAC, and Netscape Navigator4 that same year had a number of bugs, particularly in CSS rendering. By 1997, IE5.0 has far outperformed Netscape Navigator in the market, not only in terms of commercial success, but also in terms of application speed and support for W3C standards.

Netscape, desperate, discovered DigitalStyle, a small technology company dedicated to the next generation of typography engines, which it acquired the same year.

In 1998 the new typesetting engine was named Raptor, and netscape, influenced by open source projects such as Linux, which were popular at the time, declared it open source, publishing the source code directly on the Web. Later, due to trademark issues, Raptor changed its name to NGLayout (Next Generation Layout). Eventually, NGLayout was renamed Gecko by Netscape’s marketing division after the little Gecko.

In October 1998, Netscape announced that the next generation typesetting engine for the browser would use Gecko, with an optimistic timeline of just six months. This decision led to the death of Netscape’s fifth browser, but netscape’s sixth browser was not released until 25 months later, in November 2000.

The fourth version of Internet Explorer 4 was released in October 1997, and the built-in typesetting engine was Trident, which is how Microsoft is closing in on its rivals

On November 24, 1998, Netscape, in decline, saw its stock plummet and was acquired by AOL that year

On July 15, 2003, AOL announced the dissolution of Netscape, and the Mozilla Foundation was formed the same day.

The bankruptcy of Netscape, the founding of the Mozilla Foundation, the official release of Firefox the following year, and then it became popular on the web. Many early Web developers would have liked Firefox very much, because it didn’t have as many security vulnerabilities as IE, it ran very smoothly, and it had a lot of plug-in support, especially for developers, good debugging plug-ins, Get a lot of Web developers involved with Firefox users.

Forbes.com called Firefox “Browser of the Year 2004”

PC World also included Firefox in its “top 100 Products of 2005.

Which? Also nominated Firefox as the best Web browser

Firefox was downloaded 200 million times in 2006

In 2008, Firefox was downloaded 500 million times

With the release of Firefox, which quickly became popular around the world and whose typography engine is based on Gecko, let’s take a look at Netscape 6.21 and Firefox UserAgent

// Firefox 2.0.0.11: Mozilla/5.0 on Windows XP (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; The rv: Gecko / 20071127 Firefox / 2.0.0.11 1.8.1.11)Copy the code

At this stage, the typography engine became the focus of the browser, so it didn’t matter if it was Mozilla or not, but all subsequent browsers kept the Mozilla/5.0 header for the sake of compatibility with older sites.

The Mozilla Foundation basically depends on Google for its survival. It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on it, and although it has had a bad time, it has had a good time with Google most of the time

Its age

In 2003, Joe announced that Apple would develop its own browser, Safari, which was officially released in June of the same year. The new browser would face the same problem as Internet Explorer, which was how to let web sites know that the new browser could also render their web applications, so the developers disguised userAgent.

Mozilla / 5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; En) AppleWebKit/124 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.1Copy the code

All of the remaining browsers had the Mozilla/5.0 start, Firefox was based on Gecko, and Safari was based on WebKit, a kHTML-based layout engine

In 2008, Google created its own Chrome browser, which was based on WebKit, so its userAgent was similar to Safari’s. After version 28, Google has become the largest contributor to WebKit, but Apple has the inner voice. Therefore, Google developed blink rendering engine based on webKit branch to replace WebKit, but the userAgent did not change.

The final browser userAgent follows the following format

Mozilla / 5.0 (Platform; Encryption; OS-or-CPU; Language) AppleWebKit/AppleWebKitVersion (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/ChromeVersion Safari/SafariVersionCopy the code

Opera is mentioned in the Little Red Book, and the userAgent of this browser keeps changing, but eventually it will follow the same format as other browsers, but with the OPR logo and version number added at the end

Mozilla / 5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; X64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36 OPR/52.0.2871.64Copy the code

conclusion

To summarize, first it was because netscape’s internal code name was Mozilla, then it didn’t matter what browser it was because of the typography engine Gecko, and eventually Apple developed webKit, a new typography engine based on KHTML, to make it compatible with older Web projects. So KHTML, like Gecko, and now the browser’s userAgent rules are settled.

Well, that’s the end of the article, if you want to learn more about some of the other knowledge listed in the article, please refer to the following links.

Refer to the link

1. Wikipedia web browser
2. History of Mosaic
3. Netscape Navigator
4. JavaScript Advanced Programming (version 4) Client-side detection
5. The history of Gecko