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I just noticed today that Netscape 9.0 is available. However, the User-agent, as logged, was
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5pre) Gecko/20070604 Firefox/2.0.0.4 Navigator/9.0b1
This may raise some problems with both Firefox and Netscape browser sniffing routines, since a browser is now only "pure Firefox" if the Firefox identifier is not followed by "Navigator", and Netscape browser detectors will now need to look for that "Navigator" string following a normal Firefox user-agent string, in addition to the older Mozilla-only and "Netscape" User-agent strings.
By the looks of it, Netscape may have thrown in the towel on deep customization of their browser; While Netscape 8.1.2's download weighed in at 18.3 MB, the Netscape 9.0b1 download weighs in at a mere 5.56 MB -- actually smaller than Firefox 2.0.0.4's 5.73MB download file.
I've ignored that "b1" on the User-agent string up until now. I'm not sure if this really is a Beta release, or if someone just forgot to remove that prior to rollout. It's even more interesting to see that they're using the rv:1.8.1.5pre rendering engine though, since the latest Firefox/2.0.0.4 is still using rv:1.8.1.4.
Anyway, yet another browser version to test with, although I think it'll probably behave exactly like Firefox 2.0.0.4 as far as your server-side apps are concerned.
Jim
This may raise some problems with both Firefox and Netscape browser sniffing routines
Does anyone still follow the archaic practice of browser sniffing?
Lots of "webmasters" use canned menu scripts and layouts that rely on sniffing - that's why so many sites are broken in Apple's Safari on Windows release. It will be the same situation with this Netscape release.
