I made Anubis, a lightweight, open-source Web Application Firewall designed to block automated bot attacks without frustrating real users. Anubis uses techniques like TLS fingerprinting and JavaScript proof of work to keep your site safe while staying flexible, fast, and easy to deploy.
Afaik, almost every browser uses “Mozilla/5.0” as part of the user agent, Mozilla mentions it as well in developer docs about User agents, it’s a historical compatibility thing apparently.
it’s even stupider, it’s more like why there is no windows 9 because of programs doing stuff like ifos.name.startswith("windows 9") thenprint("this program is not compatible with windows 98") end
Yup. There was a time when Mozilla was somewhat dominant, so browsers unlocked features based on the browser being Mozilla (as opposed to Internet Explorer).
well if you want to get into it, i think the last browser that didn’t have mozilla in the useragent was internet explorer, which had “trident/9.0” or something. every other browser on the market is based on the old KDE browser Konqueror, which had “khtml, like gecko” in it. when that didn’t work they just added “mozilla” to it. then apple took that codebase and added “safari”, chrome took that codebase and added “chrome”, etc etc etc. compatibility problems just kept compounding on every browser based on khtml until we got to the point where microsoft edge’s current user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36Edg/134.0.0.
even firefox has had to give in to this: my useragent is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101Firefox/140.0 even though the version of gecko in firefox 140 is v125, from 2022.
Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.
Why does default config check Mozilla specifically?
{ "name": "generic-browser", "user_agent_regex": "Mozilla", "action": "CHALLENGE" }Guess that’s why I’ve seen Anubis check screen quite a few times.
Afaik, almost every browser uses “Mozilla/5.0” as part of the user agent, Mozilla mentions it as well in developer docs about User agents, it’s a historical compatibility thing apparently.
Interesting, thanks!
Guess it’s the same kinda thing as amd64 on Intel lol
it’s even stupider, it’s more like why there is no windows 9 because of programs doing stuff like
if os.name.startswith("windows 9") then print("this program is not compatible with windows 98") endYup. There was a time when Mozilla was somewhat dominant, so browsers unlocked features based on the browser being Mozilla (as opposed to Internet Explorer).
well if you want to get into it, i think the last browser that didn’t have mozilla in the useragent was internet explorer, which had “trident/9.0” or something. every other browser on the market is based on the old KDE browser Konqueror, which had “khtml, like gecko” in it. when that didn’t work they just added “mozilla” to it. then apple took that codebase and added “safari”, chrome took that codebase and added “chrome”, etc etc etc. compatibility problems just kept compounding on every browser based on khtml until we got to the point where microsoft edge’s current user agent is
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.even firefox has had to give in to this: my useragent is
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0even though the version of gecko in firefox 140 is v125, from 2022.Lol
The creator of Anubis did an interview on the Selfhosted Show podcast a little while back and explains this in detail, and it’s worth a listen.
Here’s a time stamped link for the interview
Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.
Thanks!