Latest user agent strings for major browsers and OSs; checks for updates daily:
https://jnrbsn.github.io/user-agents/user-agents.json
TL;DR: I made it better, more correct, and more reliable! 🎉
When I created this repo around 4.5 years ago, it originally screen-scraped the user agent strings from whatismybrowser.com. Around two years ago, that website blocked GitHub Actions. So then I thought I had a clever idea of using The Internet Archive and also making it take regular snapshots. But then, because of legal problems, The Internet Archive was temporarily shutdown for a month last year. Regardless of the shutdown, the GitHub Action just fails sometimes for various reasons. It has become fragile and complex, and I don't like it. I also learned, as I was researching the rewrite of this, that some of the user agent strings on whatismybrowser.com are not even valid/correct. They're obviously generating their strings using outdated rules.
Meanwhile, in the years since I created this repo, the state of the browser user agent string has changed in significant ways. Driven by frustration with constant user-agent-sniffing bugs, as well as a desire to reduce browser fingerprinting, every major browser now hard-codes most of its user agent string. There are now fixed strings for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and things like CPU architectures and engine versions are now fixed as well.
- Chrome: In Chromium, the user agent string is now well-documented. On the desktop version, the only parts that aren't fixed are the OS/platform (which can only be one of a handful of fixed strings) and the major version of Chromium (the minor parts of the version are hard-coded as zeros).
- Firefox: The macOS version and Windows version are now fixed in Firefox, and the CPU architecture is now hard-coded for all OSs. On Linux, the OS part of the user agent is usually just generic anyway, with a hard-coded special case for Ubuntu. Also, the Gecko version has been fixed for many years on desktop.
- Safari: In WebKit, the macOS version and the WebKit version are now fixed. The only thing that Safari adds to the WebKit user agent is the Safari version at the end.
- Edge: Edge is based on Chromium and mostly uses the same user agent string, but it adds the major version of Edge at the end, which somewhat amusingly, is the same as the major version of Chromium.
So now, instead of using fragile methods of screen-scraping a website of dubious quality, I get the latest major version of each of the above browsers from official sources and then generate the following 16 user agent strings:
- two most-recent versions of Chrome on macOS, Windows, and Linux (Chrome rolls out releases very gradually, so it's common to have many users on the previous version) (6 strings)
- latest and ESR (extended support release) versions of Firefox on macOS, Windows, generic Linux, and Ubuntu (8 strings)
- latest version of Safari on macOS
- latest version of Edge on Windows