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by oofabz 4907 days ago
At the time, Microsoft's hegemony over the web browser market was at its peak. Firefox was the only real competitor. If web pages checked the user agent, they probably only accounted for these two browsers. Anything else fell back to legacy behavior, disabling DHTML (later called Web 2.0). This made Gmail suck.

KHTML had almost no market share - it only ran on KDE, and most KDE users used Firefox. Nothing recognized its user agent string, so reporting "KHTML" would have been as ineffectual as reporting "Safari" or "WebKit".
3 comments
georgemcbay 4907 days ago
"At the time, Microsoft's hegemony over the web browser market was at its peak. Firefox was the only real competitor."

Actually at the time this is referencing Firefox didn't exist (Gecko did, but Firefox didn't). I'm well aware of the history and why browsers trick out their user agents. If you want to go one level deeper, look no further than the fact that IE still pretends to be Mozilla because of the early days when they were late to the party.

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donmelton 4907 days ago
Firefox wasn't a big factor when Safari debuted. And the project was still called "Phoenix" back then. I believe that other Mozilla and Gecko-based browsers were more widely used at that time.
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mpyne 4907 days ago
> KHTML had almost no market share - it only ran on KDE, and most KDE users used Firefox.

As mentioned before, Firefox didn't even exist at this point. And KHTML itself actually predates Linux Gecko by a few months as well.

Don Melton forked KHTML/KJS internally in 2001, and announced the work to KDE at the beginning of 2003... GMail wasn't released until 2004!

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