I just noticed that while all other browsers seem to have their own user agent strings, Microsoft Edge's seems to look something like this:
User Agent details for Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.52 Safari/536.5.
Why does it have Mozilla, Chrome and Safari, and not just Edge in it?
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2 Answers
So Why does it have Mozilla, Chrome and Safari, and not just Edge in it?
Webpage designers are simply lazy, and they attempt to block visitors from using specific browsers, because they want to use the easier framework which is only supported by certain browsers.
It also is a deliberate design decision to limit the usefulness of user-agent checks. This decision likely based on the fact (from the perspective of Spartan/Edge Developers), is that in the past, websites would look specifically for IE and notify users to use a different browser.
Since Edge/Spartan was Microsoft's first attempt to modernize the Trident engine, and Edge/Spartan's purpose was to match the feature set of (Blink, AppleWebKit, and Gecko) at the time, the user agent simply advertising itself as being everything is one way to prevent Webpage designers from easily targetting Edge the same way they targeted IE.
Many websites that you visit today will not display well in IE because they are not coded properly and usually display a page like they would in an old browser, even though Internet Explorer 11 supports many of the new web standards. Some pages will display incorrectly in IE while working perfectly fine on other browsers such as Chrome or Firefox.
There's also a problem with jerky scrolling that doesn't go away for some websites even after you turn off smooth scrolling, and there are cases in which important elements will not display because a webpage identifies your browser as IE.
Chrome and Firefox also does something similar:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT X.Y; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2657.0 Safari/537.36,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)'
It is worth pointing out that IE11's user agent is similar:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
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Edge pretended to be Chrome, and Chrome pretended to be Safari, and Safari pretended to be Mozilla. And Edge used EdgeHTML but revealed it not, and Chrome used Blink, but revealed it not, but Chrome pretended to use WebKit. And Webkit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko. And confusion abounded excessively on the face of the web.
![(windows (windows](http://i.imgur.com/5dSiN4M.jpg)
Taken from What is the User Agent string name for Microsoft Edge? comment by Claude
Microsoft Edge UA string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10136
Neowin recently reported that Microsoft’s new browser for Windows 10, Spartan, uses the Chrome UA string, “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0″.That is done on purpose.
You’ll also notice that the entire string ends with “Edge/12.0″, which Chrome does not.
I should point out, that this isn’t a redical departure from what Microsoft did with IE 11, which on Windows 8 reads: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko, as explained in this post.
What is User Agent sniffing?
Often, web developers will UA sniffing for browser detection. Mozilla explains it well on their blog:
Serving different Web pages or services to different browsers is usually a bad idea. The Web is meant to be accessible to everyone, regardless of which browser or device they’re using. There are ways to develop your web site to progressively enhance itself based on the availability of features rather than by targeting specific browsers.
Often, lazy developers will just sniff for the UA string and disable content on their website based on which browser they believe the viewer is using. Internet Explorer 8 is a common point of frustration for developers, so they will frequently check if a user is using ANY version of IE, and disable features.
All user agents strings contain more information about other browsers than the actual browser you are using – not just tokens, but also ‘meaningful’ version numbers.
Internet Explorer 11’s UA string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Microsoft Edge UA string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10136
The userAgent property has been aptly described as “an ever-growing pack of lies” by Patrick H. Lauke in W3C discussions. (“or rather, a balancing act of adding enough legacy keywords that won’t immediately have old UA-sniffing code falling over, while still trying to convey a little bit of actually useful and accurate information.”)
We recommend that web developers avoid UA sniffing as much as possible; modern web platform features are nearly all detectable in easy ways. For example, the Modernizr library is a fantastic and simple way of detecting features.
Over the past year, we’ve seen some UA-sniffing sites that have been updated to detect Microsoft Edge… only to provide it with a legacy IE11 code path. This is not the best approach, as Microsoft Edge matches ‘WebKit’ behaviors, not IE11 behaviors (any Edge-WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing).
In our experience Microsoft Edge runs best on the ‘WebKit’ code paths in these sites. Also, with the internet becoming available on a wider variety of devices, please assume unknown browsers are good – please don’t limit your site to working only on a small set of current known browsers. If you do this, your site will almost certainly break in the future.
Conclusion
By presenting the Chrome UA string, we can work around the hacks these developers are using, to present the best experience to users.
Taken from What is the User Agent string name for Microsoft Edge? answer by Dave Voyles.
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This question already has an answer here:
- Why do all browsers' user agents start with “Mozilla/”? 5 answers
When I myself send many requests to the server I found it amazing that in IE if I choose opera user string that the value of user string was
But if I choose another browser in Internet Explorer that it puts Mozilla 5.0 in the user string first.
When I send the ajax request from Chrome that I found same thing that they put user string
I found that Mozilla is an organization that doesn't have anything to do with Google and Microsoft. Perhaps it was a competitor for both. Why do MSFT and Google both put Mozilla in their user agent? Is there any reason for putting Mozilla in connection string?
Why do chrome and IE both put Mozilla in the userstring when they send the request? I do not know why but is there any specific reason for that?
![Chrome/40.0.2181.0 Chrome/40.0.2181.0](/uploads/1/2/4/7/124744007/643902246.png)
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marked as duplicate by George Stocker♦Feb 22 at 17:43
This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
1 Answer
See: user-agent-string-history
It all goes back to browser sniffing and making sure that the browsers are not blocked from getting content they can support. From the above article:
And Internet Explorer supported frames, and yet was not Mozilla, and so was not given frames. And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.
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