Your browser says you are using

CCBot/2.0 (

Funny Browsers!

Why Your Browser Impersonates Another

You need a way of knowing the browser someone is using, but the browser war makes it difficult, this is why:

Long time ago when there were just few browsers, like Netscape and Mozilla, they were playing it fair and reporting to be who they are. For example, when I'm with Mozilla and I am on a website, my browser will report that I am using Mozilla/1.0 i.e Version 1.0 of Mozilla Firefox. Then Netscape might show that I am using Netscape/2.0

Everyone was ok, but not all browsers were capable of everything then. For example, lets say the first Netscape supported only texts. Then Mozilla incorporated images. Webmasters would ask their webpages to show texts only if the visitor was using a Netscape, and show text and images if the visitor was using Mozilla. This made several people to switch to Mozilla.

Netscape knew there was need to re-invent, so it upgraded its browser to include images. But webmasters didn't upgrade the webpages and people were still switching to Mozilla. The people at Netscape were angry. There was only one way webmasters knew what browser each visitor came with. It was through the user agent string that reported Mozilla/1.0 or Netscape/1.0 or Netscape/2.0

Not that webmasters intentionally didn't want Netscape to be able to view their content, they were taking precautionary measures to make sure the visitor doesn't get error messages. Some needed to be paid to upgrade the script for their clients though. Others didn't know that Netscape has upgraded.

And then it hit Netscape to impersonate Mozilla so that those using Netscape will get served the content served to those using Mozilla. They reported their user agent string as "Netscape/2.0 Mozilla/1.0 capable" ! That way, webmasters were deceived because when their scripts searched for Mozilla from that string, they found a result and when they searched for Netscape, there is a result too. And Netscape browser could even play videos. People started switching to Netscape because the browser was now capable of showing all content in a webpage.

And the war raged!

What started as a little altercation turned into really silly situation - Rihanna

Mozilla was losing users, and it invented frames and included vidoes and all that stuff that made Netscape unique. But webmasters were excluding the browser from getting served the real content. They decided to impersonate Netscape too and it began. since then, till date, browsers report wrong user agents to impersonate one another and to stop browser sniffing and prevent webmasters from hiding specific content from them!

For example, while using Google Chrome, this is what my browser reported that I was using: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36

Lol, I'm not alone on that. This is what your browser is reporting:

CCBot/2.0 (

Funny Browsers!

What's the way forward?

Now that all browsers are up to standard, everyone should be proud of their names and leave the impersonation to the underdogs. Mozilla Firefox, be proud. Google Chrome be proud. Apple Safari, be yourself. Opera, you are really great! Microsoft Internet Explorer, you used to be king! Be yourself guys! A function from php called get_browser() can help you if you ever run into trouble of detecting browsers!
This story was Twisted! Not Real life, but the war is real!