Wrong user agent?

[athosbr99]

Hi there,

I looked up the user agent for the Edge Chromium browser and this showed up:

user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3761.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/75.0.127.0
accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3

Is "Edg" a typo or it is deliberated? Just curious. 

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@athosbr99 it's a delibreate change, check https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/04/08/microsoft-edge-preview-channel-details/ ; there is a paragraph titled "User Agent String" that explain why it had to be made :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Here it is :

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/74.1.96.24

We’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.

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[#3]

@AimanJ awkward but I imagined something like that. but most services detect it as Chrome anyway. thanks for the link and info :)

[#4]

@athosbr99 It's a pleasure, & you are right about how some services detect it: in a way, it serve the point, since it's based on chromium (and thereof share the same features), & some sites/webapps rely on user agent to check compatibility, it basically tell them to treat it as if it's Chrome.

Again, glad to be of help, & have a nice day :)

[#5]

If you are ever curious about what your new browser is reporting itself as to other sites, you can go to edge://version/ in the new browser and it will show you the user agent string it is using. There are dozens of these different EDGE:// urls for more information and settings, and you can see the entire list of them by going to edge://edge-urls/ There are even some rather important command style URLS that are used for crash analysis and reporting..

[#6]

Thank you @AimanJ for this response, it is right on the money. Thank you @athosbr99 for the question.