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http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=try_nav_all

I get

Browser CodeName: Mozilla

Browser Name: Netscape

Browser Version: 5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.186 Safari/535.1

Cookies Enabled: true

Platform: Win32

User-agent header: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.186 Safari/535.1

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  • 2
    Are you trying to do something with this information, or just asking out of curiosity? The very short version is that useragent information like this is a giant mess of lies to get around bad browser sniffing, indicate compatibility/similarity, etc. But if you're actually trying do something, there's probably a better way to test for browsers. It's pretty unusual now and even discouraged to do actual browser sniffing like this, in part because of the problem you're seeing.
    – Su'
    Commented Oct 7, 2011 at 18:45
  • I'm asking for curiosity
    – Dan
    Commented Oct 7, 2011 at 19:49
  • The majority of User Agents now settle on including "Safari/537.36"
    – Chris Walsh
    Commented Jan 25, 2021 at 10:48

2 Answers 2

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Basically it started because some websites used to sniff the user-agent to tell what browser someone was using so they could block browsers that they thought wouldn't work with their websites. Specifically, websites were blocking Internet Explorer because it didn't offer as many features as Netscape Navigator. Instead of simply building a website that works across browsers, webmasters chose to just block IE completely. To get around that, Internet Explorer started to put Mozilla in their user-agent (with "compatible" in parenthesis).

Another reason is some browsers share the same rendering engine. For example, both Safari and Chrome use the webkit rendering engine. Firefox and SeaMonkey both use gecko. As a result they will both have pieces of their user-agent which will match and/or mention the other browser.

This article has a good summary of user-agent history in much more detail.

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Almost every browser says it's Mozilla, meaning it is (more or less) compatible with Mozilla rendering engine.

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