46

I understand that KHTML is the HTML Layout Engine used, but what significance does the "like Gecko" part have? Why is it there?

Is there a historical reason similar to the "Mozilla" part of the User Agent String?

bruno
  • 2,213
  • 1
  • 19
  • 31
sidney
  • 757
  • 1
  • 6
  • 10

1 Answers1

46

Konqueror began to pretend to be "like Gecko" to get the good pages, and called itself Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; FreeBSD) (KHTML, like Gecko).

For more information, read:

Luke Humberdross
  • 155
  • 8
Melad
  • 855
  • 12
  • 14
  • 39
    In case you see this answer and are Konfused, Konqueror is the browser for KDE that WebKit is based on and Chrome and Safari are based on WebKit. – Novaterata Jul 30 '15 at 20:42
  • 3
    The "the good pages" @Melad is talking about, I learned, were pages with `frame`s and `iframe`s, which I guess are kinda like today's experimental CSS features, and the whole idea of saying "like Gecko" would I guess be like Firefox starting to obey `-webkit-` CSS vendor prefixes because Mozilla got tired of developers only including the `-webkit-` prefixed rules and leaving out the `-moz-` ones. – Jacob Ford Jul 28 '16 at 15:37
  • @JacobFord Couldn’t browsers other than Gecko and Konqueror understand `frame`s? Why couldn’t they get _good web code_ that Gecko gets? – Константин Ван Aug 19 '19 at 03:08
  • 3
    @КонстантинВан Webmasters would program their servers to host different versions of their webpage depending on the browser's reported user agent string. Often it was as simple as checking if it contained the substring `Gecko`. Check that [history of the browser user-agent string](https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/) for a good folky history. If you want to adapt it into a banjo-heavy song, I'm in. – Jacob Ford Aug 20 '19 at 14:51
  • it was really a good read this link ... got a lot of laughts! I could not stay quiet as i read, just the way they wrote it was so funny; a "must read" more than many best sellers ... – SammuelMiranda Mar 22 '21 at 18:51