Sunday, November 9th, 2008
User-Agent Headers: Crazy? Or Craziest?
Category: Browsers
DeWitt Clinton reminder me of just how out of control User-Agent headers are by posting one from his logs:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Tablet PC 2.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; Media Center PC 5.1; Zune 3.0; OfficeLiveConnector.1.2; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618)
It’s Sunday, so why not waste some time commenting with the craziest, longest user-agent that you can find?
4 rating from 14 votes
You managed to convince me to change mine:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1; with super power plasma guns; (compatible; Black Pearl 6.2; Flying Dutchman 3.6; Millennium Falcon 1.5; Energizer Bread Batter 5.2; Random Tandem March of Death 2.79.13 Linux Version; .NET Crap Language Revision 5.2.7)
Not that creative, but the best I could come up with on short notice.
Unique user-agent headers are useful in tracking visitors. IP address plus user-agent is all you need.
This one visits our site from time to time, generating 404’s by requesting “/text/javascript”:
SonyEricssonK800i/R1ED Browser/NetFront/3.3 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 (Mediobot/1.0 +http://bot.medio.com)
If it wasn’t for the fact that their developers has so poor understanding of the medium, I would probably write to them, and point the error of their ways.
I might however, decide to publish the complete works of Shakespeare on that URL, for that user-agent, just to spam their indexes.
A coworker mentioned on friday that the string “Bryan Peters is hot” was showing up as a user agent string in our logs.
A cursory google search revealed nothing about who this dashing hacker may be ;-)
The longest from my most recent logs:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 3.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.2; NET_mmhpset)
(Yes, all that. Not sure if that’s supposed to be IE 7 or IE 6. It was ostensibly a human being, with a referrer I get many of my hits from, and visiting a few pages.)
Longest one from my logs:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; InfoPath.2)Longest one from my stats system:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) ; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) (CZee EmbeddedWB); User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) (EmbeddedWB 14.52 from: http://www.bsalsa.com/); .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)
472 characters long, enhanced with 4x MSIE 6.0 surfing power!
Mine is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6; en-gb) AppleWebKit/528.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.4.1 DoesLettingYouSeeThisViolateTheNDA/1.0
Must do a quick trawl through the work logs… some of them are a bit nuts.
pah, the best I can do:
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; Embedded Web Browser from: http://bsalsa.com/; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)
@MaratDenenberg: So would my roommate and I, who both use Safari, be the same visitor as far as you’re concerned?
Wow. Those bsalsa guys get around.
DeWitt Clinton’s blog post didn’t get a link in the article so here it is.
Also, from now on my UA is
HokeyCokey/1.0 (You put your left leg in, your left leg out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about. You do the hokey cokey and you turn around. That's what it's all about...):)@MaratDenenberg, @eyelidlessness (great name, btw):
That’s OK, I’d be two or more people depending on whether I was browsing, developing or reading pages saved for later – that’ll make up for you and your roommate :)
@PeterCowburn: I did that for a while, but got fed up of being told that a site couldn’t decide which browser I was using and deciding that an error message would be an acceptable default. I then used a Googlebot’s UA for a while, to see what kind of black/grey hattage was going on on my regular sites… but kept running into “you claim to be a googlebot, but we can tell you aren’t etc.,”. All in all, it’s less grief to just leave it alone :(
@jtresidder: LOL! (And thanks! Most people can’t even be bothered to spell it right, I usually get some permutation of eyelidness…)