Forum Moderators: phranque
We use "virtual hosting" to host several domains on the same ip address. All the SE spiders love it, as has been discussed on this forum. And most (all?) current browsers support it.
But, apparently, there are still some browsers in use that do not support it and get bad results when they try to visit our sites. If I understand it correctly, this is an HTTP 1.1 feature and HTTP 1.0 requests do not include the "HOST" value in the HTTP header that is necessary to resolve the domain in a virtual hosting situation.
I need to know how much traffic we are missing bacause of this. Does anybody have information that will help us estimate how big a problem this is? What is the last version of Netscape, IE and other browsers that issue only HTTP 1.0 requests? Or, any statistics about how many poeple are still non HTTP 1.1 compatible browsers?
I know it must be a very small percentage of the traffic. But, a client wants answers...
If I understand it correctly, this is an HTTP 1.1 feature and HTTP 1.0 requests do not include the "HOST" value in the HTTP header that is necessary to resolve the domain in a virtual hosting situation.
More accurately, HTTP 1.0 user agents aren't required to include a "Host" header. Many actually do, including Googlebot.
What is the last version of Netscape, IE and other browsers that issue only HTTP 1.0 requests?
Netscape added "Host" in Navigator 2.0. Lynx got on board at 2.5. MSIE and Opera, so far as I know, always included "Host" headers. Pretty much anything released since 1996 is including a "Host" header, whether or not it's fully HTTP/1.1-compliant.
I wouldn't consider this a real issue for web design. Over 80% of the Web is on virtual hosts; browsers that don't support virtual hosting are so hopelessly nonfunctional that they've been abandoned by all but the most derranged users.
As for numbers, the Counter stats for January [thecounter.com] show 713 visits from Navigator 1.0 out of 499178940 total visits. That's .0014 percent, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of those were just robots that use "Mozilla 1.0" as an identifier.
