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fartness (banned)
Donald Trump 2016
join:2003-03-25
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fartness (banned)

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Mozilla 4.0 vs. 5.0

I notice IE is 4.0 and Firefox is 5.0... what's the difference in Mozilla versions? What is Mozilla? In theory, is Firefox faster? Thanks.

orinoco
Are You Sirius?
Premium Member
join:2003-06-29
irrelevant

orinoco

Premium Member

Mozilla is the Netscape browser. v4 was Netscape Communicator. v5 are Gecko-powered browsers: Mozilla, FireFox, Netscape 6/7.

Microsoft and others place Mozilla in the user agent to be "compatible", at least was the case years ago. It probably doesn't make a difference anymore.

quanta
Premium Member
join:2002-05-07
Toronto, ON

quanta to fartness

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to fartness
said by fartness:
what's the difference in Mozilla versions? What is Mozilla? In theory, is Firefox faster? Thanks.
Mozilla 1.x is the open source web browser that is used as the codebase for the Netscape 7 series. The latest version, Mozilla 1.6, is much more up to date and has more features than Netscape, however.

Gecko is the "engine" all the Mozilla/Netscape browsers use.

"Mozilla" was also the internal codename for Netscape Navigator way way back in the 90's. So "Mozilla 3.0" would be Netscape Navigator 3.0, and so forth.

Sometimes user agent strings will report Mozilla or Netscape as "Mozilla 5.0", as speaking in terms of lineage, Mozilla is the 5th Netscape. Confused yet? Moving on...

Mozilla Firefox is an experimental standalone browser developed by Mozilla.org. The latest version is based on Mozilla 1.7 code, and theoretically is faster, but I don't see it. It does have some interesting features and takes up less disk space, however.