
History of the browser user-agent string (2008) - jtchang
http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
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ErikAugust
And to think Larry Page wanted to be a "good net citizen" with his user-agent
string:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO05LIU/ushhUIQQ-
ogJ)

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mh-cx
Hilarious.

To me the similarity to evolutional processes is striking. I mean, didn't
biological evolution also give rise to sometimes bizarr creatures? They
somehow coevolved with the other inhabitants in their niche.

Still they live their (sometimes not so) happy lifes.

What a weird world this is.

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yagop
And then Microsoft built Edge and tries to be Chrome too with UA as
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10136

~~~
glandium
The best thing that could happen is that Chrome would pretend to be Edge too,
that would definitely kill UA sniffing for good, because there would now be
two distinct browser engines with the same user-agent.

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jimktrains2
I've always thought the UA header should just be removed. Sniffing is a bad
thing and analytics on it are mainly used to preemptively decide not to use
features that you should just use feature detection for (and for tools like
Google Analytics comes from the js lib not the UA header anyway). Plus it's so
many wasted bytes.

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therealidiot
I use an extension to fake my UA to that of other browser+OS combinations.
It's silly how many sites serve you different things based on the User-Agent
still.

Google doesn't even work properly if I don't identify my browser - the results
show but clicking them does nothing. I still fake the version and OS though.

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yuhong
Note that the history of the WebKit/KHTML user agents is more complex than the
article indicates.

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lazyjones
Since browser vendors are clearly out of their minds, it's up to users to end
this mess and save a few bytes of traffic in the process: just set your user-
agent string to something short (most browsers allow it without add-ons).

~~~
takeda
Not exactly what you are suggesting, but uMatrix has an option to once in a
while switching user agent to random one from the list. This is implemented
for privacy reasons.

Sadly there still some websites where you want to disable it though, because
they block some features otherwise.

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oulu2006
This is great, I often wondered why the user agent strings are so the same
between different browsers.

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ikeboy
This seems to date from 2008
[https://web.archive.org/web/20080904080055/http://www.webaim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080904080055/http://www.webaim.org/blog/user-
agent-string-history/)

~~~
dang
Ok, we added 2008 to the title.

