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Fix sites detecting MS Edge as a Google Chrome browser
Like others I find most of the browser detecting sites report that we are using a Google Chrome Browser that's really annoying. Now this is a problem. We love MS Edge and sites should also show what we are using!
It hampers MS Edge popularity and market share statistics .
I suggest that MS Edge team fix this.
Okay I actually found out why those websites are showing the incorrect browser:
- They are old.
- Those website developers haven't updated the code in their websites to detect the new Edge browser which has a different UA.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/04/08/microsoft-edge-preview-channel-details/
User Agent String
With Microsoft Edge adopting Chromium, we are changing our user agent string to closely resemble that of the Chromium user agent string with the addition of the “Edg” token. If you’re blocking site access on user agent strings, please update your logic to treat this string as another Chromium-based browser.
Below is the user agent string for the latest Dev Channel build of Microsoft Edge:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.48 Safari/537.36 Edg/74.1.96.24We’ve selected the “Edg” token to avoid compatibility issues that may be caused by using the string “Edge,” which is used by the current version of Microsoft Edge based on EdgeHTML. The “Edg” token is also consistent with existing tokens used on iOS and Android. We recommend that developers use feature detection where possible and avoid browser version detection through the user agent string, as it results in more maintenance and fragile code.
- Hello,
Which channel/version are you using?
the user agent looks fine in 83.0.471.0
edge://version/ It actually is reporting edge in its user agent.
However, original edge used to say 'Edge' in its user agent, now its displaying 'Edg' instead, this is mainly because of compatibility; given all the standardizing issues with the legacy Edge, most sites would display older forms or simply refuse to support edge.
Those sites may have not been updated in years, so even if the problems with that browser were solved they'd still behave the same way.
To prevent this from happening edge is now reporting 'Edg'.
Newer sites should have no problems recognizing it as -the new- Microsoft Edge.
Older ones may think its an unsupported browser, but because edge also has Chrome in its user agent, they will identify it as Chrome compatible.
Checking and blocking based on user agents is not the best practice, and considering how user agents are being deprecated soon (i.e they will only be used to check between mobile/desktop devices, and for backwards compatibility the browser's version/name will stay 'frozen') this should not cause any problems.
Thraetaona Sadly it seems most popular browser detecting sites have not been updated yet. Because they are still showing it as a Chrome browser. It's sad to see
- Hmm, most show Edge to me.
But it really should not cause any problems, since user agents are soon getting deprecated anyway and the browser's name/version will stay frozen at a certain version.
So they won't stay a viable method to compare browsers' usages.
