Ok, I'm embarrassed to admit this. I've run at least one server of my own for two decades and the user agent data in my server log files still perplex me.
Take this for instance:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Is this just a very complex way of saying the user agent was an old version of Chrome on a Windows 10 machine that was rendered with Safari/Webkit version 537.36?
@kccqzy do you have any idea why Safari is in there?
I'm trying to figure out why the user agent info looks so crazy. If it's being spoofed, what purpose does it serve to give such a nonsensical agent string?
If it's an actual legitimate response, what does it mean?
@sysop408 I think the reason is that Chrome originally used WebKit, the same rendering engine as Apple's Safari. So at that time when Safari/webkit was considered to be the best rendering engine and websites were giving Safari the best content, Chrome didn't want to be left in the dust. That's why it pretended to be Safari. Chrome only stopped sharing a rendering engine with Safari since 2013, about five years after its birth.
The legitimate purpose is that some old sites from the late 2000s might give Safari a better webpage than other dominant browsers like IE, so Chrome pretending to be Safari gets these better webpages.
@kccqzy oh wow. So that's how things got so completely out of hand. I do remember all those browsers trying to one-up the other ones and the "Best Viewed on Netscape Navigator" badges.
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