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See All. Edge is the new browser that Microsoft has been trying to shine a spotlight on lately, but if you still prefer Internet Explorer, the process to change your user agent is the same.
Like many other browsers, Edge supports custom user-agent strings. Also, remember to clear or undo all changes made to your user-agent string if you want to browse the internet as intended. Many websites will alter the way content is delivered to you based on your user agent, so forgetting this can cause you to view websites in a suboptimal way.
Craig is a long-time writer, coder, and marketer with years of experience in the technology and gaming spaces. Since , he's worked remotely with some of the most notable publications in these industries, specializing in Windows, PC hardware and software, automation, and the like. Read Craig's Full Bio. We hate spam too, unsubscribe at any time. It might interest you to know that when you send a web request to a server on the Internet, your browser identifies itself and provide other technical information that the web server needs to provide a better response.
Without a browser identifying itself, web servers will only return a generic response which might not render well depending on the web browser used. And no, the concept of the user agent is not associated only with web browsers. I used web browsers as they are the most common ones known to Internet users. Crawlers , web scrapers , game consoles with access to the Internet, and even smart TVs or some IoT devices are user agents.
After reading this article in full, you will have enough knowledge about the user agent. A user agent is any software that interacts with web servers on behalf of Internet users. They can also be seen as a bridge between you and the Internet. Any software that sends web requests to web servers is a user agent whether its works independently of human interaction as it is in the case of automation tools or bots or in the case of web browsers and other software that accept direct commands from humans.
Take, for instance, if you want to send access content online, you will have to make use of a web browser that serves as the user agent that deals with retrieving, rendering, and making it possible for you to interact with the content. In a network protocol, the client is seen as the user agent, which is used in communication with a client-server network system. It might interest you to know that your email reader is a mail user agent.
User agents do not stop there — your gaming console can be a user agent, so is your smart TV and other Internet-enabled devices. As stated earlier, when a client software sends a web request to a web server, it sends its identity alongside the requests providing the Internet server information about itself, which includes but not limited to its name, application type, operating system, software version, software vendor, rendering engine, and among other information provided.
All of these details are put together in a string known as the user agent string. The user-agent string is bundled into the user-agent header in an HTTP web request. Take, a standard Google Chrome browser running on a Windows Operating System will send the below string as its user agent string.
Every other browser, web bot, and other client application has its own string its use in identifying itself. Looking at the strings above, you can see that it carries the name of the browser, its OS and platform, as well as versions, among others.
One thing you need to take note of is that while there is a standard in naming, there is no compulsion in following the standard, and as such, some user agent strings can have just the name of the application or use an arbitrary or fake name.
Some bot developers go as far as using the user agent of popular browsers in others to hide their activities. You might be wondering why would client software identify itself and what do web servers need that information for? It turns out that user agents have two major uses. These include content negotiation and access granting and blocks. There are many variants of a web page served to devices based on their capabilities.
Take, for instance, the structure of the Google search engine result page varies depending on the browser or platform you are using to access it. By looking at the user agent string, Google is able to serve you the best version for your browser and device. There are many other sites on the Internet that make use of user-agent for providing a better user experience.
Without a user-agent, at best, you are served the generic version of a page, which may or may not render well on your browser. Bot developers use this to walk around avoiding JavaScript-rich site by using mobile browser agents that will get web servers to return a non-JavaScript heavy version of a page. Perhaps, the most popular use of the user-agent string is to know whether a particular client software has the access right to access certain content or not.
Web servers use the user-agent string in an HTTP request header to exclude crawlers, scrapers, and other bots from accessing their platform. Many of the popular websites on the Internet frown at bot traffic and, as such, will deny access to user-agents other than that of popular browsers. While they do this internally, they can provide web crawlers signals via the robots.
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