Why do Chrome and IE put “Mozilla 5.0” in the User-Agent they send to the server? [duplicate]

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See: user-agent-string-history

It all goes back to browser sniffing and making sure that the browsers are not blocked from getting content they can support. From the above article:

And Internet Explorer supported frames, and yet was not Mozilla, and so was not given frames. And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.

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