Gecko User Agent variaitions are driving me nuts

Is Debian a browser or an OS?

[GaryK]

I do my best to maintain an up to date browscap.ini file (at the site in my profile) for use with IIS, PHP, JAVA and others. Lately I am being driven insane by all the variations on the Gecko user agents, some of which seem to make no logical sense. I am writing this message in hopes that someone can help me shed some light on any or all of these issues. Thanks in advance for your time.

Here's a case in point. Debian. Strictly speaking it is a free OS based on Linux and GNU, as I understand it. So why does it not show up in the area reserved for the OS in the user agent? It instead appends itself to the end of an existing user agent and calls its OS Linux. thus looking more like a separate browser like Phoenix, than just plain Mozilla using the Debian OS.

I can at least understand it when Phoenix and others do it because they're properly using Gecko, with some tweaks of their own to make it essentially a new browser.

I need to get a handle on all these Gecko/Debian issues and I'm hoping someone here can explain it or at least point me to some good reference material.

BTW, I'm sure you all can see I'm basically a Windows-person so please be kind to me on all these non-Windows issues. :)

[littleman]

I'll take a stab. The Debian at the end of the UA doesn't reflect the OS as much as it reflects the packaging - sort of. See, there are a good amount of dynamically shared libraries that have to mesh up for the Debian versions of Mozilla to work, and those libraries are maintained in by Debian.

[GaryK]

Thanks, littleman.

So would the same hold true for Phoenix and Chimera? And now I'm starting to see even more Gecko user agents with odd names tagged onto the end, such as this one in today's log:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; m18) Gecko/20001120 N6 Toolkit-Fall '00

The m18 above throws me for a loop too. It's really hard keeping up with browsers when there seems to be no logic to it.

[seindal]

Hi,

Debian is packaging something that is not an exact copy of the distibution from mozilla.org, so mozilla.org requires that it is marked in the User-Agent that debian mozilla isn't the same as mozilla.org mozilla.

The Debian maintainer is doing the Right Thing(tm).

See
[mozilla.org...]
[bugzilla.mozilla.org...]

René.