I was looking through one of my web site's logs, and it appears that Windows Vista sends out a lot more data in its GET command than Windows XP.

 

Here is the information in a Windows XP IE6 GET command:

 

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"

 

Here is the information in a Windows XP Firefox GET command:

 

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0"

 

Here is the information in a Windows Vista IE7 GET command:

 

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; MSDigitalLocker Vista 1.3; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04320)"

 

I understand the browser and operating system version information, but I don't have any idea what the rest of the information means. While a few extra pieces of data may not look like very much, do you think it will add up if a web site receives thousands of hits each day? How do you think this could affect bandwidth and log size once a larger number of people begin using Vista?

Bandwidth, not much, log sizes a bit, but oh well...

 

Have you tried IE7 on windows XP? That'd be a better comparison. As for what it all means it's probably information to allow difference services to know what can run... That's just a guess though.

Here is IE7 on Windows XP:

 

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; IEMB3)"

 

I wonder why it says "Mozilla/4.0"? I thought IE6 and earlier used trident and IE7 uses a completely new rendering engine. Looking at the logs, it looks like IE has said "Mozilla" since IE5.

yeah "new" hahahah....

 

the mozilla means a specific thing about compatibility. There is no rendering engine called mozilla, look up gecko...

 

Interesting strings though, you googled?

IIRC the Mozilla in the User-Agent is a throwback from the browser wars when IE was being blocked from some sites because they only supported Netscape so IE put that in there to fool them and allow their users access and therefore help gain marketshare (kind of like how Opera allows you to set your User-Agent to pretend you are using IE or some other browser if the site is being silly).

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent#User_agent_spoofing