GECKO browser

Who uses it?

[Sweet Cognac]

Recently checking my stats, and I have a 1/4 of my visitors coming in on a Gecko browser. I read some information on it in Google, but it doesn't appear to be made public yet, and it's the original Layout engine Netscape developed, and will be included in Netscape 5.

Who would use this browser, or is it another name for Mozilla in my stats?

[2by4]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

And so on, all Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/Galeon/K-Meleon/Netscape >= 6 and some others use gecko rendering engine. The most common one is currently Firefox

[Robin_reala]

Some background information - browsers are generally made up of a user interface and a rendering engine (which gnerally includes network connectivity etc). Building a rendering engine is a serious effort, so a lot of smaller browsers piggyback an existing rendering engine and just create their own interface.

Gecko is the Mozilla Foundation's rendering engine and is used in many current browsers. An incomplete list to look for would be Netscape 6+, Mozilla (all versions), Firefox, Camino, K-meleon, Minimo, and a host of smaller browsers.

Other rendering engines you may hear about are Presto (Opera 7+), Trident (Internet Explorer, Crazybrowser, Maxthon), Tasman (IE/mac and MSN for OS X), and Webkit (Safari, newer Omniwebs, Shiira, etc).

[lovehealthsuccess]

Very helpful. Thank you!

When designing a site with a focus on being "all browser" compatible...would we be looking to adhere to the specs and requirements of the unerlying ENGINE for each browser...or must we look to what each specific BROWSER has set up in the way of preferences, requirements, etc.?

[encyclo]

It is the rendering engine which drives the browser - so Gecko browsers will all have similar rendering, to the extent that they use the same version of the rendering engine.

So, modern versions of the Mozilla suite, Firefox and Netscape 8 will give identical rendering as they are based on the Gecko 1.7 branch, Netscape 7 uses earlier versions (1.0 to 1.4), Netscape 6 even earlier (pre 1.0). Netscape 6+ will have the most problems, but it is virtually dead now so not work testing for.