Chrome’s User-Agent string

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

It upsets me how many product names other than Chrome are in there just because stupid JS tries to guess what the browser can do. Next time, we need a new way to detect browser capabilities. I suggest we detect the actual capabilities, not try to guess based on who shipped what feature first in 1997.

It’d be cool if the browser vendor cartel got together one day and decided all User-Agent strings would be simple again, like “Chrome/0.2.149.27 (Windows NT 5.1; en-US)”. And any jankety-ass copy and paste image rollover script from 1997 that breaks if the string doesn’t start with “IE” or “Mozilla” can get stuffed.

4 Responses to “Chrome’s User-Agent string”

  1. capelis.dj says:

    At least it’s a kind of amusing and interesting record of every browser’s heritage…

  2. Chris Bennett says:

    in other oddness, about:mozilla still works too (but not in WebKit) =P

    IE even did it for a while (now res://mshtml.dll/about.moz )

  3. Rick Auricchio says:

    Jankety-ass? I love it.

    I had to look up “jankety” and found a definition at http://www.urbandictionary.com:

    “junky meets rickety with skanky overtones”

  4. Brian Lee says:

    We should just assume that everyone who is rational uses firefox and chrome. :)

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