User-Agent

The User-Agent request header is a characteristic string that lets servers and network peers identify the application, operating system, vendor, and/or version of the requesting user agent.

Please read Browser detection using the user agent for why serving different Web pages or services to different browsers is usually a bad idea.

Header type Request header
Forbidden header name no

Syntax

User-Agent: <product> / <product-version> <comment>

Common format for web browsers:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (<system-information>) <platform> (<platform-details>) <extensions>

Directives

<product>
A product identifier — its name or development codename.
<product-version>
Version number of the product.
<comment>
Zero or more comments containing more details; sub-product information, for example.

Firefox UA string

For more on Firefox- and Gecko-based user agent strings, see the Firefox user agent string reference. The UA string of Firefox is broken down into 4 components:

Mozilla/5.0 (platform; rv:geckoversion) Gecko/geckotrail Firefox/firefoxversion
  1. Mozilla/5.0 is the general token that says the browser is Mozilla-compatible. For historical reasons, almost every browser today sends it.
  2. platform describes the native platform the browser is running on (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, etc.), and if it's a mobile phone. Firefox OS phones simply say Mobile — the web is the platform. Note that platform can consist of multiple "; "-separated tokens. See below for further details and examples.
  3. rv:geckoversion indicates the release version of Gecko (such as "17.0"). In recent browsers, geckoversion is the same as firefoxversion.
  4. Gecko/geckotrail indicates that the browser is based on Gecko. (On Desktop, geckotrail is always the fixed string 20100101.)
  5. Firefox/firefoxversion indicates the browser is Firefox, and provides the version (such as "17.0").

Examples

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X x.y; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0

Chrome UA string

The Chrome (or Chromium/Blink-based engines) user agent string is similar to Firefox’s. For compatibility, it adds strings like KHTML, like Gecko and Safari.

Examples

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36

Opera UA string

The Opera browser is also based on the Blink engine, which is why it almost looks the same, but adds "OPR/<version>".

Examples

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.106 Safari/537.36 OPR/38.0.2220.41

Older, Presto-based Opera releases used:

Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00
Opera/9.60 (Windows NT 6.0; U; en) Presto/2.1.1

Safari UA string

In this example, the user agent string is mobile Safari’s version. It contains the word "Mobile".

Examples

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Internet Explorer UA string

Examples

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0)

Crawler and bot UA strings

Examples

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Specifications

Specification Title
RFC 7231, section 5.5.3: User-Agent Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content
RFC 2616, section 14.43: User-Agent Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1

Browser compatibility

DesktopMobile
ChromeEdgeFirefoxInternet ExplorerOperaSafariAndroid webviewChrome for AndroidFirefox for AndroidOpera for AndroidSafari on iOSSamsung Internet
User-AgentChrome Full support YesEdge Full support 12Firefox Full support YesIE Full support YesOpera Full support YesSafari Full support YesWebView Android Full support YesChrome Android Full support YesFirefox Android Full support YesOpera Android Full support YesSafari iOS Full support YesSamsung Internet Android Full support Yes

Legend

Full support
Full support

See also