[9720] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: content negotiation by User-Agent
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Kristol)
Mon Jan 29 14:23:38 1996
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 96 14:10:59 EST
From: dmk@allegra.att.com (Dave Kristol)
To: www-talk@www10.w3.org
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Just some random data points.... Our www.research.att.com is
moderately busy. In the past 36 hours or so, we've gotten hits from
over 40 distinct versions of Mozilla alone. FWIW, these are the top
five Mozilla User-Agent strings we've seen in that period (minus the
comments), in order, with a range of hits of 3-to-1:
Mozilla/1.1N
Mozilla/2.0b6a
Mozilla/1.22
Mozilla/1.12
Mozilla/2.0b5
Some of the low-runners among the 40+ are version 0.9x.
One message in the "Microsoft IE -- it just gets better and better"
thread suggested that as soon as Netscape goes to its next version,
MS will be stuck. I disagree. Clearly there are a lot of old versions
of Netscape's own browser that content providers must deal with anyway.
Upgrades don't happen as quickly as some think.
How is User-Agent-based content negotiation supposed to work in the
face of so many versions?
Dave Kristol
