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Okay I give up. Given the user agent string below, which browser is being used? It might be IE8, since I can't envision firefox sending this. If it is IE8, why the hell is the "Mozilla" string in there? I am not familiar with the history or taxonomy of this stuff. Also, from whence does the string "OfficeLiveConnector" arise? I am not familiar with this product.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; BRI/2)

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Throw it in here and have a read useragentstring.com –  LukeR Mar 29 '12 at 23:24

2 Answers 2

A long time ago in an Internet far far away, Netscape (aka Mozilla) was the standards leader. It sent Mozilla (etc) as the browser string. Poor IE didn't send Mozilla, so web servers said 'No, you're not supported, go away'. So, IE (and everyone else) starting sending Mozilla in the beginning of the browser string because it eventually did support all of the special HTML, and then more additional information later on in the browser string. And now it's 2012 and that's just the way it is.

Short version: Almost everyone sends Mozilla first and then more specific user agent material later. The additional things are because Microsoft feels like putting in additional information (which .NET libraries we support, etc) which are more properly handled in different ways these days... but that's what the state has evolved to.

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Well, the Mozilla part of the line has more to do with a history of Internet standards and Netscape "back in the day," but that is MSIE 8. Office Live is a Microsoft product that uses IE.

The Internet Explorer User-Agent string on MSDN

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