User-Agent

The User-Agent request header contains a characteristic string that allows the network protocol peers to identify the application type, operating system, software vendor or software version of the requesting software user agent.

Header type	Request header
Forbidden header name	no

Syntax

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

Common format for web browsers:

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

Directives

<product>

A product identifier

<product-version>

A version number of the product.

<comment>

Zero or more comments containing sub product information, for example.

Firefox UA string

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

Mozilla/5.0 (platform; rv:geckoversion) Gecko/geckotrail Firefox/firefoxversion

• Mozilla/5.0 is the general token that says the browser is Mozilla compatible, and is common to almost every browser today.
• platform describes the native platform the browser is running on (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux or Android), and whether or not 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.
• rv:geckoversion indicates the release version of Gecko (such as "17.0"). In recent browsers, geckoversion is the same as firefoxversion.
• Gecko/geckotrail indicates that the browser is based on Gecko.
• On Desktop, geckotrail is the fixed string "20100101"
• 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 the Firefox format. 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

Safari UA string

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

Examples

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.3; de-ch; HTC Sensation Build/IML74K) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30

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

Browser compatibility

See also

• User-Agent detection, history and checklist
• Firefox user agent string reference

• Browser detection using the user agent