Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla

  I just wrote a dummy server trying out the asio library from boost, and tried to access it using Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. I thought there was some sort of caching, as whenever I was accessing the server using Explorer, the log was showing me the User Agent String of Internet Explorer as:

GET /sciport HTTP/1.1

Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, ...

Accept-Language: ro

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; ...

  However, it seems that it is kept so for historical reasons, although it wasn't mentioned exactly what these reasons are.
  (update) After some searching I came across this explanation: http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/. I recommend it; it's a very funny read :-)