User Agent Madness

Just found this one in my http logfile;

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.111 Safari/537.36 OPR/27.0.1689.69

So one User Agent string mentioning 4 browsers (Mozilla, Safari, Chrome and finally Opera 27, which is the actual browser) and 3 rendering engines (Applewebkit, KHTML and Gecko)? There is a lot of web-history in those 127 characters.

3 thoughts on “User Agent Madness”

  1. The “Mozilla” part does not refer to a browser (there is no browser with that name), but to a rendering engine. Nowadays it is used to indicate compatibility with the Mozilla rendering engine.

    Reply
    • Small follow-up; I installed Mozilla M3 (the windows variant), the first public release of the Mozilla Suite and the useragent is … “Mozilla/5.0 [en] (Win95; I)” (although I’m on Win7) 🙂
      M16 (released June 13th, 2000) seems to be the first one that came with a more or less full UA-string (identifying both browser & rendering engine), as it identifies itself as “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT; en-US; m16) Gecko/20000613”
      But enough with the archeology already! 😉

      Reply

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