Netscape didn't contribute to the Internet, it was the Internet! Netscape was what made the Internet popular. There was no competition then!

You're missing one important point, Rumpletweezer: Netscape is financing the Mozilla development and most of the programmers are former Netscape employees. Without Netscape, there wouldn't be Mozilla (of course, since Mozilla is only the continuation of Netscape Communicator) and without it, Mozilla wouldn't have continued after Milestone 3 or something. There are no 'different directions' - Netscape just changed the business model of its browser (proprieter to open source) and called it by its original codename again.

If you knew someone named bob, had always called him bob, but someone told you one day to call him robert, would you?

As far as nutscrape goes, it may have contributed to the internet in the past, but it is not a very good browser (at least not anymore, although I don't know how it stacked up against the competition back in the v3~v4 days). And lets not waste time with the moz=nutscrape argument. They both have the same roots, but they have gone in different directions since then. And while nutscrape 7 is based on moz 1.x, nutscrape added a lot of branding and bloat, and removed or hid several features.

Right. I'll call you Rumpletweezer from now on then. In case you don't like that, keep in mind that it was you who introduced me to this "I call things the way I think about them" - concept. Oh, and you should keep in mind that without Netscape, we wouldn't be talking here now. In fact, I doubt I'd even have an Internet connection if it wasn't for Netscape!

It's the way I think of these products/companies. I never think of nutscrape as "netscape", nor do I ever think of "M$" as MS nor "micorsoft". Sometimes I think of aol as "aol" and sometimes I think of it as "aohell". How I post the name depends on how I'm thinking of it when I post. I don't refer to you as "joe smith" because I don't think of you as "joe smith", likewise I don't use the real names of these products/companies for the simple fact that I don't think of them by their real names.

As for "Micro$hit Internet Exploder" and all its 'frontends', they all suck. Seriously though: could we stop this childish namechanging? It's not very mature.

AOL browsers work off the IE engine (meaning that just like the MSN explorer browser as well as neoplanet, crazy browser, etc, aol is just an IE frontend).

As far as aohell switching to nutscrape browsers, I was under the impression that they had already done that with their newset version, but that first aol one I posted had v8.0 (the newset version), but was running off of IE5.0. Most likely, it won't be until aol 9.0 that they switch to nutscrape.

I think older versions of AOL are actually Internet Explorer and newer ones are Mozilla. So it's not possible to put them into just one category. Just like Netscape: Older ones are their own branch, newer ones are Mozilla.

Are you sure the AOL browser is a "stand-alone" software? Or is it just some kind of frontend/skin? The problem is that you won't get an answer by the users because they belong to the people who don't know what they're using anyway.

Edited by Tapuak at 16:09 on June, 10th 2003

The script is now working pretty well, so in case anyone's interested: http://www.goodolddays.net/browserstats.php. I'm not claiming to tell anything new with that, I just wrote it for the sake or writing it. And before anyone asks: I'm not one of the 5 people who used IBrowse to access the site, nor am I one of the 3 with text browsers Inaccuracies occur every time some browser 'spoofs' in a completely convincing way (like K-Meleon), half-assed 'spoofing' (like Opera's) is recognized.

That's about as useful as the stuff about "Dot Net"

I was too lazy to bother. :p

It is rather interesting that it puts itself in the browser ident like that.

So didn't I, but I search the Internet for it

If you say so. I've never seen it before.

DigExt is some kind of spider of Internet Explorer for the function of making visited pages available offline. Not really important for this cause, though.

Here's another one, newer version of IE, but older version of aol.

-----------
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 7.0; Windows 98)
-----------

I don't know what that DigExt thing is in the first one since it doesn't appear to be connected to aol (unless it's something with aol 8.0).

Edited by Cypherswipe at 13:17 on June, 09th 2003

Hey, that AOL-one is interesting

I had a friend of mine visit that page with his aol browser

___________
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; AOL 8.0; Windows 98; DigExt)
--------

btw I just realized that in my first post, I had opera set to identify as IE6.0. Here are all of opera v7's spoofs:

MSIE 6.0
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Opera 7.0 [en]

moz 3.0
Browser: Mozilla/3.0 (Windows 98; U) Opera 7.0 [en]

moz 4.78
Browser: Mozilla/4.78 (Windows 98; U) Opera 7.0 [en]

moz 5.0
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows 98; U) Opera 7.0 [en]

opera 7.0
Browser: Opera/7.0 (Windows 98; U) [en]



...and here's opera 6.05 pretending to be MSIE 5.0
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98) Opera 6.05 [en]

Phoenix 0.4 (before it was changed to firebird)
-----------
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021029 Phoenix/0.4
----------

It's been a looooooong time since I fired up phoenix, seems very wierd now.

inet tabs (IE frontend)
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)

neoplanet (IE frontend)
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)

Edited by Cypherswipe at 11:14 on June, 07th 2003

Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; YComp 5.0.0.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)

IE 6.0.2800

No, I meant the way K-Meleon does it. Your new example is more in the line of "Internet Explorer 5.5".

Another unknown browser:(from what I've heard before, a browser called "Safari" does exist, but the version number looks kind of strange)

(most likely Netscape 4 again)

Edited by Mr Creosote at 10:20 on June, 04th 2003