User Agent: Learn Your Web Browser’s User Agent Now

Your User Agent is:

Your IP Address is:

52.172.24.188

Browser Information:

User agents are unique to every visitor on the web. They reveal a catalog of technical data about the device and software that the visitor is using. Armed with this information, you can develop richer and more dynamic websites that deliver different experiences based on the user agent that’s visiting.

User agents are also critical in controlling search engine robots using the robots.txt file on your server. But they don’t function perfectly in every situation, and the information in a user agent string can be faked.

In order to leverage this information, you need to understand the component parts of a user agent string and consider also the potential risks of using this method to deliver content.

What Is a User Agent?

Everyone that is browsing the web right now has a user agent. It’s the software that acts as the bridge between you — the user — and the internet.

It’s easiest to understand user agents if we backtrack and look at the evolution of the web. That way we can understand the benefits of user agents.

When the internet was a text-based system, right back at the beginning of its use, users had to type commands to navigate and send messages. Now, we have browsers to do that for us. We simply point and click, and the browser is acting as our “agent,” turning our actions into commands.

How Does a User Agent Work?

When your browser (or similar device) loads a website, it identifies itself as an agent when it retrieves the content you’ve requested.

Along with that user-agent identification, the browser sends a host of information about the device and network that it’s on.

This is a really set of data for web developers since it allows them to customize the experience depending on the user agent that’s loaded the page.

User Agent Types

Browsers are a straightforward example of a user agent, but other tools can act as agents. Crucially, not all user agents are controlled or instructed by humans, in real-time.

Search engine crawlers are a good example of a user agent that is (largely) automated — a robot that trawls the web without a user at the helm.

Here’s a list of some of the user agents you’ll encounter:

• Browsers: Including Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, BlackBerry, Opera, Opera Mini, iOS Safari, Chrome for Android, Samsung Internet, QQ browser, and others.
• Crawlers: Google, Google Images, Yahoo! Slurp, and hundreds more.
• Consoles: PlayStation 4, Wii, PlayStation Portable and Bunjalloo — the Nintendo DS’ built-in browser.
• Legacy operating systems (for example, AmigaVoyager).
• Offline browsers and similar (for example, Wget and Offline Explorer).
• Link checkers (for example, W3C-checklink).
• Plus a whole range of feed readers, validators, cloud platforms, media players, email libraries, and scripts.

HTTP User Agent Strings

Once the user agent has identified itself to the web server, a process called content negotiation can begin. This allows the website to serve different versions of itself, based on the user agent string.

The agent passes its ID card over to the server, and the server then negotiates a combination of suitable files, scripts, and media.

In the early days of the web, user agents were used to distinguish Mosaic from Mozilla, since Mosaic did not support frames, while Mozilla did.

How to Read a User Agent String

To look at a user agent string in more detail, take a look at this example user agent string, as generated by the WhoIsHostingThis User Agent Tool.

Your results will be unique to your computer, device, and network, but here is one from a computer we have in the office:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36
(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.84 Safari/537.36

Breaking the example down, we get the following information:

• The user agent application is Mozilla version 5.0, or a piece of software compatible with it.
• The operating system is OS X version 10.2.2 (and is running on a Mac).
• The client is Chrome version 51.0.2704.84.
• The client is based on Safari version 537.36.
• The engine responsible for displaying content on this device is AppleWebKit version 537.36 (and KHTML, an open-source layout engine, is present too).

What to Look for in a User Agent String

Dissecting user agent strings can be tricky since there is no standard format. But there are guides and analytics tools all over the web that can help. For most designers, the application, version, and engine are likely to be key.

Note that a huge part of the user agent string is concerned with compatibility. That’s because Internet Explorer originally had to declare itself to be Mozilla compatible in order to receive content with frames.

In practice, the majority of browsers now declare themselves to be Mozilla compatible to ensure that they can access all of the content on the web.

Content Negotiation

So the user agent string is a little muddled. But it’s still useful. What can we do with it?

We can:

• Check the capabilities of the browser or device, and load different CSS based on the outcome;
• Deliver custom JavaScript to one device compared with another;
• Send an entirely different page layout to a phone, compared to a desktop computer;
• Automatically send the correct translation of a document, based on the user agent language preference;
• Push special offers to particular people, based on their device type or other factors;
• Gather statistics about visitors to inform our web design and content production process, or simply measure who’s hitting our site, and from which referral sources.

Overall, we can empower our scripts to make the best choice for our visitors, based on their user agent.

More, we can feed that data back into a cycle of continuous improvement, analytics and other processes, like conversion optimization.

User-Agents and Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a file on your web server that controls how some user agents behave. In the majority of cases, we use robots.txt to tell search engine crawlers — or “robots” — what to do.

As we mentioned in the introduction, search engine crawlers are a very specific type of user agent. The information in the robots.txt file applies only to crawlers, and it’s up to the crawlers to interpret them as we intend.

Let’s look at some examples.

How To Ban or Permit Crawlers with Robots.txt

To ban all crawlers from visiting a website, we’d create a text file called robots.txt, place it in the top-level (web-accessible) directory on our server, and add the following text:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To allow all crawlers permission, we would add the following text to our robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

You can also ban and permit specific crawlers and restrict or allow access to specific folders.

Latest Google Chrome User Agents

Here are the latest Chrome user agents:

• Chrome for Android (mobile & tablet)
  • Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; ; ) AppleWebKit/ (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/ Mobile Safari/
• Chrome for iOS
  • Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.1.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/56.0.2924.75 Mobile/14E5239e Safari/602.1
• Chrome WebView (KitKat to Lollipop)
  • Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4; Nexus 5 Build/_BuildID_) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/30.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
• Chrome WebView (Lollipop and above)
  • Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.1.1; Nexus 5 Build/LMY48B; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/43.0.2357.65 Mobile Safari/537.36

Frequently Asked Questions

You may still have some queries about user agents, what they are, and how they work. Here are some questions and answers to get you started.

What is user agent in a HTTP request?

A user agent is a particular string of characters in each browser that allows acts as an identification agent. The user agent allows the web-server ti to identify the operating system and the browser. Then, the web server uses the exchanged information to determine what content is presented to particular operating systems and web browsers on a series of devices.

What is in a user agent string?

The user agent string contains the user application or software, the operating system (and their versions), the web client, the web client’s version, and the engine responsible for the content display (such as AppleWebKit). The user agent string is sent in form of a HTTP request header.

What is user agent detection?

User agent detection is the process of acknowledging and analyzing the user-agent string to acquaint with the string’s properties. User agent detection can be useful for websites to optimize and target various browser features as opposed to specific browser types.

What is user agent spoofing?

User agent spoofing is a term used to describe an instance where a web browser’s user agent’s contents allow the web browser to pose and identify as another browser. Since websites often check the browser type when presenting content to users, user agent spoofing is beneficial for many web browsers in terms of compatibility.

What is WebKit used for?

WebKit is a HTML browser engine. It is an open-source engine developed by Apple and is primarily used in Apple’s Safari and iOS browsers. It is a rendering engine that processes HTML and CSS to interpret and present web pages. WebKit is also responsible for allowing you to navigate through links on a web page.