Three Browsers in One: Lunascape

Screen shot of Lunascape's configuration screen where users can change rendering engine.

I like to think I’m pretty smart about web browsers, sporting four on my mobile phone and six on my desktop computer in regular day-to-day use. Heck, I even started the evolt.org browser archive back in 1999 with 80 unique browsers at the time (which I am pimping to the W3C Web History Community Group).

But then this tweet came through my timeline:

How did I miss this?

So I went to the Lunascape Wikipedia article, and then to the Lunascape English site and promptly downloaded it.

It’s too early for me to review it, but I did run a quick check to see how it reports itself in the user agent string as compared to the browsers whose core rendering engines it is using. My results…

Trident

Internet Explorer version 9 reports itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)

Lunascape, when using the Trident rendering engine, reports itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; BRI/2; InfoPath.3; Lunascape 6.7.1.25446)

Gecko

Firefox 12 reports itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0

When using the Gecko rendering engine, Lunascape reports itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120410 Firefox/3.6.28 Lunascape/6.7.1.25446

Webkit

Chrome 19 reports itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.46 Safari/536.5

Safari 5.1.2 for Windows reports itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.52.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.2 Safari/534.52.7

Under the Webkit engine, Lunascape reports itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Lunascape/6.7.1.25446 Safari/535.3

Conclusions

It looks like Lunascape doesn’t share the rendering engines for Gecko and Webkit with the browsers in which we’ve come to associate them.

Beyond that, I have no conclusions. I was just looking at the UA string and figured others might find it interesting and/or useful.

One Comment

Not much impressive as it has outdated versions of rendering engines.
I love Maxthon, which now comes with Trident & WebKit, and almost updated versions.

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