Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

Dave Hyatt has been kicking butt at addressing Safari issues raised by Web citizens. Regarding the choice to mimic the Mozilla/Gecko user-agent string:

The reason it is there is that in order to work with real-world DHTML sites you have essentially two options: you can claim to be MSIE or you can claim to be Gecko. We found that any other choice that we tried led to a significant portion of DHTML malfunctioning. You would not believe (well, maybe you would) how much DHTML exists out there that works only with MSIE or Gecko, and that uses proprietary extensions of each to accomplish the DHTML effects.

Being a proponent of DHTML for applications, I can understand this. But problems with CSS are often much more visible than those with DHTML (i.e. CSS usage has climbed while DHTML is slowly retreating into intranets and closed application environments). The KHTML engine apparently has a number of CSS bugs that some web developers protect against by hiding CSS from Konqueror.

So it seems that that the goal was to disguise Safari as Mozilla to give UA sniffers the slip, in hopes that the Safari developers could get the KHTML bugs fixed fast enough so that it wouldn’t matter by the final release. This strikes me as more strategic than practical, but whatever. This can turn into a win-win situation, provided that the Safari developers fix the bugs quickly (and according to Hyatt, they are) so that the final release of Safari is worthy of passing the MSIE/Gecko test. Kick these fixes back to KDE, and help Konqueror in the process. If two heavily standards-compliant browsers go to market as a result, I’m willing to forgive the breach.