Is there a standard way for a web server to be able to determine a user&#39;s timezone within a web page? 

Perhaps from an HTTP header or part of the `user-agent` string?


Determine a user&#39;s timezone

How can I detect if a user is viewing my web site from a mobile web browser so that I can then auto detect and display the appropriate version of my web site?

Auto detect mobile browser (via user-agent?)

I don&#39;t know if I just have some kind of blind spot or what, but I&#39;ve read the OAuth 2 spec many times over and perused the mailing list archives, and I have yet to find a good explanation of why the Implicit Grant flow for obtaining access tokens has been developed. Compared to the Authorization Code Grant, it seems to just give up on client authentication for no very compelling reason. How is this &quot;optimized for clients implemented in a browser using a scripting language&quot; (to quote the specification)?

Both flows start out the same (source: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-22):

1. The client initiates the flow by directing the resource owner&#39;s user-agent to the authorization endpoint.
2. The authorization server authenticates the resource owner (via the user-agent) and establishes whether the resource owner grants or denies the client&#39;s access request.
3. Assuming the resource owner grants access, the authorization server redirects the user-agent back to the client using the redirection URI provided earlier (in the request or during client registration).
- The redirection URI includes an authorization code (Authorization code flow)
- The redirection URI includes the access token in the URI fragment (Implicit flow)

Here&#39;s where the flows split. In both cases the redirection URI at this point is to some endpoint hosted by the client:

- In the Authorization code flow, when the user agent hits that endpoint with the Authorization code in the URI, code at that endpoint exchanges the authorization code along with its client credentials for an access token which it can then use as needed. It could, for example, write it into a web page that a script on the page could access.
- The Implicit flow skips this client authentication step altogether and just loads up a web page with client script. There&#39;s a cute trick here with the URL fragment that keeps the access token from being passed around too much, but the end result is essentially the same: the client-hosted site serves up a page with some script in it that can grab the access token.&lt;br/&gt;

Hence my question: what has been gained here by skipping the client authentication step?

What is the purpose of the implicit grant authorization type in OAuth 2?

All popular browsers&#39; user agent strings, even Internet Explorer&#39;s, start with `Mozilla/`. Why is this the case?

Why do all browsers&#39; user agents start with &quot;Mozilla/&quot;?

How can I find the OS name and OS version using JavaScript? 

How to find the operating system details using JavaScript?

I want to bounce users of our web site to an error page if they&#39;re using a version of `Internet Explorer` prior to v9. It&#39;s just not worth our time and money to support `IE pre-v9`. Users of all other non-IE browsers are fine and shouldn&#39;t be bounced. Here&#39;s the proposed code:

    if(navigator.appName.indexOf(&quot;Internet Explorer&quot;)!=-1){		//yeah, he&#39;s using IE
    	var badBrowser=(
    		navigator.appVersion.indexOf(&quot;MSIE 9&quot;)==-1 &amp;&amp;	//v9 is ok
    		navigator.appVersion.indexOf(&quot;MSIE 1&quot;)==-1	//v10, 11, 12, etc. is fine too
    	);
    						
    	if(badBrowser){
    		// navigate to error page
    	}
    }

Will this code do the trick?

To head off a few comments that will probably be coming my way:

 1. Yes, I know that users can forge their `useragent` string. I&#39;m not concerned.
 2. Yes, I know that programming pros prefer sniffing out feature-support instead of browser-type but I don&#39;t feel this approach makes sense in this case. I already know that all (relevant) non-IE browsers support the features that I need and that all `pre-v9 IE` browsers don&#39;t. Checking feature by feature throughout the site would be a waste.
 3. Yes, I know that someone trying to access the site using `IE v1` (or &gt;= 20) wouldn&#39;t get &#39;badBrowser&#39; set to true and the warning page wouldn&#39;t be displayed properly. That&#39;s a risk we&#39;re willing to take.
 4. Yes, I know that Microsoft has &quot;conditional comments&quot; that can be used for precise browser version detection. IE no longer supports conditional comments as of `IE 10`, rendering this approach absolutely useless.

Any other obvious issues to be aware of?

Detect IE version (prior to v9) in JavaScript

If you were going to store a user agent in a database, how large would you accomdate for?

I found this [technet article][1] which recommends keeping UA under 200. It doesn&#39;t look like this is defined in the HTTP specification at least not that I found. My UA is already 149 characters, and it seems like each version of .NET will be adding to it.

I know I can parse the string out and break it down but I&#39;d rather not.


**********  
**EDIT**  
Based on this [Blog][2] IE9 will be changing to send the short UA string. This is a good change.


  [1]: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb496341.aspx
  [2]: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/23/introducing-ie9-s-user-agent-string.aspx


**********


How big can a user agent string get?

I want to get the content from [this][1] website. 

If I use a browser like Firefox or Chrome I could get the real website page I want, but if I use the Python requests package (or `wget` command) to get it, it returns a totally different HTML page. 

I thought the developer of the website had made some blocks for this.

## Question ## 

**How do I fake a browser visit by using python requests or command wget?**


  [1]: http://www.ichangtou.com/#company:data_000008.html

How to use Python requests to fake a browser visit a.k.a and generate User Agent?

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

    User-Agent	Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00

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 

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.20 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.672.2 Safari/534.20


I found that Mozilla is an organization that doesn&#39;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?

Why do Chrome and IE put &quot;Mozilla 5.0&quot; in the User-Agent they send to the server?

From what I gather, the iPad is using iPhone OS, but with a different screen resolution from the iPhone and iPod touch. So many sites may have to change their user agent detection to adapt to the iPad.

So, can anyone with access to the iPad or the iPad SDK give us the user-agent string?



What is the iPad user agent?

I have a web api `http://something.com/api` and I want to use GET to get the response body.

This is my command:

    curl &quot;http://something.com/api&quot;

Of course, it fails and gives an error message.

When I use Chrome and input the above url, everythings correct. However I do the same things with Firefox, the url gives me the same error message. I try to repeat the action with Chrome extension DHC, the request gives correct response again. After some searching, I believe that the curl option `--user-agent` makes a difference. What is the correct way to set the user agent to Chrome? Or this is not the point, the problem comes from other fields? Thank you very much.

How to use curl to get a GET request exactly same as using Chrome?

I recently started wondering about sites like http://thismachine.info/ that get the user&#39;s operating system info. I have not been able to find out how to do that with PHP, and wanted to try to figure it out.

I noticed that they list the `user-agent`, which gives lots of info about the browser. Do they get the operating system information from that, or from something else? Is there an API I could use to get the user&#39;s operating system?

I see how they got the Browser and IP, but could not figure out the Operating System part!


Get operating system info

How can I download a webpage with a user agent other than the default one on urllib2.urlopen?

Changing user agent on urllib2.urlopen

I&#39;m using this JS code to know what browser is user using for. 

    &lt;script&gt;
      document.write(navigator.appName);
    &lt;/script&gt;

And I want to get this navigator.appName to php code to use it like this:

    if ($appName == &quot;Internet Explorer&quot;) {
      // blabla
    }

How can I do it? 

How to get user agent in PHP

I&#39;d like to get a script that can grab the user&#39;s user agent and prop it to an attribute.

I&#39;m making a website problems contact form and I usually need to know what browser the user is using. How can I detect the user agent string and prop it as the value of an input element.

My html looks something like:

    &lt;input type=&quot;hidden&quot; id=&quot;UserAgent&quot; name=&quot;User Agent&quot; /&gt;

I want the user agent to be added to that as the value attribute so it would look like:

    &lt;input type=&quot;hidden&quot; id=&quot;UserAgent&quot; name=&quot;User Agent&quot; value=&quot;Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/534.53.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.3 Safari/534.53.10&quot; /&gt;

Getting the User Agent with JavaScript

What is the ***iOS 5.0*** user agent string?

Here is the ***iOS 4.0*** user agent: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3105555/836407

What is the iOS 5.0 user agent string?

I want to offer the right version of a download.  The versions I have are:

 - 32-bit Windows
 - 64-bit Windows
 - Linux

Detecting Linux using the User Agent field is easy; but is it possible to reliably figure out if Windows is 32-bit or 64-bit?

Users might be using weird browsers - IE and Firefox are common, and we probably have an Opera user somewhere; maybe a Chrome user too.  I know that 64-bit Windows 7 ships with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of IE, and I&#39;d like to send them both the 64-bit version of my download.

(Edited to add: I know that I should provide all the options, and I will.  But [people don&#39;t read the options][1].  So I wanted to provide the right download by default, to improve usability.  Of course, while this is helpful if I get it right, it&#39;s extremely unhelpful if I get it wrong.  And from the answers so far, it doesn&#39;t look like there&#39;s a reliable way of doing this).



  [1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062.html

Detect 64-bit or 32-bit Windows from User Agent or Javascript?

I have the following code in `Python`:

    from selenium.webdriver import Firefox
    from contextlib import closing
    
    with closing(Firefox()) as browser:
      browser.get(url)

I would like to print the user-agent HTTP header and
possibly change it. Is it possible?



Change user-agent for Selenium web-driver

I&#39;m trying to parse a webpage using Java with URLConnection. I try to set up the user-agent like this:

    java.net.URLConnection c = url.openConnection();
    c.setRequestProperty(&quot;User-Agent&quot;, &quot;Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2&quot;);

But the resulting user agent is the one I specify, with &quot;Java/1.5.0_19&quot; appended to the end. Is there a way to truly set the user agent without this addition?

Setting user agent of a java URLConnection

How can i detect which browser type the client is using. I have a problem where i have to ask people to use different browser (Firefox) instead of IE. How can i get this information. 

I know http request has this information (Header). How will i get the navigator.appName from the view.py in the Django framework ? 

How to detect Browser type in Django?

I want to open a url using `urllib.request.urlopen(&#39;someurl&#39;)`:

    with urllib.request.urlopen(&#39;someurl&#39;) as url:
    b = url.read()

I keep getting the following error:

    urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

I understand the error to be due to the site not letting python access it, to stop bots wasting their network resources- which is understandable. I went searching and found that you need to change the user agent for urllib. However all the guides and solutions I have found for this issue as to how to change the user agent have been with urllib2, and I am using python 3 so all the solutions don&#39;t work.

How can I fix this problem with python 3?

Changing User Agent in Python 3 for urrlib.request.urlopen

I&#39;m looking for a way to programmatically change navigator.userAgent on the fly. In my failed attempt to get an automated javascript unit tester, I gave up and attempted to begin using fireunit. Immediately, I&#39;ve slammed into one of the walls of using an actual browser for javascript testing.

Specifically, I need to change navigator.userAgent to simulate a few hundred userAgent strings to ensure proper detection and coverage on a given function. navigator.userAgent is readonly, so I seem stuck! How can I mock navigator.userAgent? User Agent Switcher (plugin) can switch FF&#39;s useragent, but can I do it within javascript?



Mocking a useragent in javascript?

Why does Internet Explorer has `Mozilla` in UserAgent?

In Firefox it&#39;s stating:

&gt;Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1

In Interner Explorer it&#39;s stating:

&gt;Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; Tablet PC 2.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C)

In some blogs/forums it&#39;s mentioned, that it is due to some historical reasons, but what&#39;s the reason?

It would be very helpful to know about it.

Why does Internet Explorer (9) report &quot;Mozilla&quot; in UserAgent?

After Apple&#39;s iOS 13 release, I realized **`window.navigator.userAgent`** in Safari on iPad iOS 13 is same as on MacOS. Something like this:

```Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0 Safari/605.1.15```

As you see, it&#39;s a wrong user-agent for iPad and there is no way to detect if the current device is an iDevice.

-----------------
After an initial research, I found a workaround for it:
&gt;Go to Settings -&gt; Safari -&gt; Request Desktop Website -&gt; All websites. You notice &quot;All websites&quot; is **enabled by default**. If you **disable** it and get window.navigator.userAgent the correct user agent is now displayed.

But I cannot ask each user to do this setting change for each device. So I tried to find another way and ended up by writing **the following code which checks if it&#39;s Safari, macOS, and touch-screen then the device should be an apple mobile device**, but I&#39;m wondering is there any better suggestion/way to detect the correct device name in Safari iOS 13?


```javascript
detectOs = function(){
   //returns OS name, like &quot;mac&quot;
};

//is Safari on an apple touch-screen device
isSafariInIdevice = function(){
   if (/Safari[\/\s](\d+\.\d+)/.test(windows.navigator.userAgent)) {
      return &#39;ontouchstart&#39; in window &amp;&amp; detectOs() === &quot;mac&quot;;      
   }
   return false;
};
```

How to detect device name in Safari on iOS 13 while it doesn&#39;t show the correct user agent?

Google is surprisingly mute on this issue.

In my company&#39;s web software error logs, we&#39;re seeing multiple individuals with an Apache access log entry that has this in it: ... HTTP/1.1&quot; 500 - &quot;-&quot; &quot;Test Certificate Info&quot;

I have no clue what piece of software this comes from or why it&#39;s sending us requests with malformed URLs... but it&#39;d be nice to find out... and perhaps to correct it if it&#39;s open source software. :)

(This might be a ServerFault question, but I&#39;m a developer so I figured I&#39;d ask here first.)

What software is sending User-Agent &quot;Test Certificate Info&quot;?

I&#39;m making a website and I want it to be compatible with the forthcoming Microsoft Edge when it comes out officially. To be more specific, the mobile version of it. Does anyone know what string will identify the Edge Mobile Browser (for example, &quot;IE Mobile&quot; identifies the mobile version of the Internet Explorer).

What is the User Agent string name for Microsoft Edge?

Is there an RFC, official standard, or template for creating a User Agent string? The iphone&#39;s user-agent string seems strange...

&gt;&gt;Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; __CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X__; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (__KHTML, like Gecko__) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16
 

What is the standard format for a browser&#39;s User-Agent string?

I am writing an app in Android that uses a WebView to display HTML content. I was told to get an Android user agent for my app - how do I do that? I opened http://whatsmyuseragent.com from my app as well as the Android browser - both the user agents are the same.

Please help!




android user agent

I understand that making [user-agent hints][1] more ambiguous is intended, in part, to make [browser fingerprinting][2] harder.

My own (Windows desktop) Chrome sends the headers:
```
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.75 Safari/537.36
sec-ch-ua: &quot;Chromium&quot;;v=&quot;86&quot;, &quot;\&quot;Not\\A;Brand&quot;;v=&quot;99&quot;, &quot;Google Chrome&quot;;v=&quot;86&quot;
sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0
```

What I don&#39;t get is:
 1. Why the string &quot;Not A Brand&quot; specifically? Does anyone else use this pseudo-UA? Is this a joke of some sort?
 2. Why the `\&quot;` and `\\A;` inside the string? My only guess is that this is supposed to mess with parsers somehow (like the anti-IE hacks in CSS), but that seems like a rather odd purpose — and IIRC, `\A` is the bell character.
 3. How is this supposed to accomplish user-agent hint ambiguity, given that it *also* sends the full `user-agent` header, which has the specific version numbers?
 4. While at it: why does Chrome&#39;s user-agent also claim to be Mozilla, AppleWebKit, and Safari? It isn&#39;t, and this `user-agent` string is distinctively Chrome&#39;s. Does it have some sort of embedded components from those other browsers?

  [1]: https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints
  [2]: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Why does Chrome use sec-ch-ua: &quot;\&quot;Not\\A;Brand&quot;;v=&quot;99&quot;?

When sharing one of my pages on FB, I want to display something different. Problem is, I prefer not to use the og: elements, but to recognize FB user-agent.

What is it? I can&#39;t find it.


How to recognize Facebook User-Agent

Is there a good, up-to-date listing anywhere that maps User-Agent HTTP Header strings --&gt; operating systems?

Operating System from User-Agent HTTP Header

When I run this command:

    wget --user-agent=&quot;Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0&quot;  http://yahoo.com

...I get this result (with nothing else in the file):

    &lt;!-- hw147.fp.gq1.yahoo.com uncompressed/chunked Wed Jun 19 03:42:44 UTC 2013 --&gt;

But when I run `wget http://yahoo.com` with no `--user-agent` option, I get the full page.

The user agent is the same header that my current browser sends. Why does this happen? Is there a way to make sure the user agent doesn&#39;t get blocked when using wget?

Sites not accepting wget user agent header

What is the best method to parse a User-Agent string in Python to reliably detect

 1. Browser
 2. Browser version
 3. OS

Or perhaps any helper library that does it

Parsing HTTP User-Agent string

How do I set a custom useragent string in a WKWebView? I&#39;m trying to embed the version of my app so that my server-side can see what features are available. I found the following method:

    let userAgent = &quot;MyApp/1.33.7&quot;
    request.setValue(userAgent, forHTTPHeaderField: &quot;User-Agent&quot;)

    NSURLConnection.sendAsynchronousRequest(request, queue: NSOperationQueue.mainQueue()) {(response, data, error) in
        let content = NSString(data: data, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)
        self.web!.loadHTMLString(content!, baseURL: url)
    }
    self.web!.loadRequest(request);
But this means the useragent is only set for that single request. The first other request (e.g. a forward), will mean the useragent is reset to default again. How can I more permanently configure the wkwebview to use my custom useragent string?

Set useragent in WKWebview

Hey Everyone, I was wondering what methods are standard within the industry to do browser detection in Rails? Is there a gem, library or sample code somewhere that can help determine the browser and apply a class or id to the body element of the (X)HTML? Thanks, I&#39;m just wondering what everyone uses and whether there is accepted method of doing this?

I know that we can get the user.agent and parse that string, but I&#39;m not sure if that is that is an acceptable way to do browser detection.

Also, I&#39;m not trying to debate feature detection here, I&#39;ve read multiple answers for that on StackOverflow, all I&#39;m asking for is what you guys have done. 

[UPDATE]

So thanks to [faunzy][1] on GitHub, I&#39;ve sort of understand a bit about checking the user agent in Rails, but still not sure if this is the best way to go about it in Rails 3. But here is what I&#39;ve gotten so far:

    def users_browser
    user_agent =  request.env[&#39;HTTP_USER_AGENT&#39;].downcase 
    @users_browser ||= begin
      if user_agent.index(&#39;msie&#39;) &amp;&amp; !user_agent.index(&#39;opera&#39;) &amp;&amp; !user_agent.index(&#39;webtv&#39;)
      				&#39;ie&#39;+user_agent[user_agent.index(&#39;msie&#39;)+5].chr
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;gecko/&#39;)
  			&#39;gecko&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;opera&#39;)
  			&#39;opera&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;konqueror&#39;)
  			&#39;konqueror&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;ipod&#39;)
  			&#39;ipod&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;ipad&#39;)
  			&#39;ipad&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;iphone&#39;)
  			&#39;iphone&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;chrome/&#39;)
  			&#39;chrome&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;applewebkit/&#39;)
  			&#39;safari&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;googlebot/&#39;)
  			&#39;googlebot&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;msnbot&#39;)
  			&#39;msnbot&#39;
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;yahoo! slurp&#39;)
  			&#39;yahoobot&#39;
  		#Everything thinks it&#39;s mozilla, so this goes last
  		elsif user_agent.index(&#39;mozilla/&#39;)
  			&#39;gecko&#39;
  		else
  			&#39;unknown&#39;
  		end
		end
		
		return @users_browser
    end


  [1]: https://github.com/traction/browser_detect/blob/4520d4d935a2cefdfc6e1b31fe08f67e351d5a60/lib/browser_detect.rb

Rails Browser Detection Methods

What is the ***iOS 6.0*** user agent string?

----------

Previous user-agent strings:

 - [**iOS 5.1** - What is the iOS 5.1 user agent string?][1]
 - [**iOS 5.0** - What is the iOS 5.0 user agent string?][2]
 - [**iOS 4.0** - What is the iPhone 4 user-agent?][3]


  [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/10152433/836407
  [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/7825873/836407
  [3]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3105555/836407


What is the iOS 6 user agent string?

I am trying to change the UserAgent of the WebBrowser control in a Winforms application.

I have successfully achieved this by using the following code:

    [DllImport(&quot;urlmon.dll&quot;, CharSet = CharSet.Ansi)]
    private static extern int UrlMkSetSessionOption(
        int dwOption, string pBuffer, int dwBufferLength, int dwReserved);

    const int URLMON_OPTION_USERAGENT = 0x10000001;

    public void ChangeUserAgent()
    {
        List&lt;string&gt; userAgent = new List&lt;string&gt;();
        string ua = &quot;Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)&quot;;

        UrlMkSetSessionOption(URLMON_OPTION_USERAGENT, ua, ua.Length, 0);
    }

The only problem is that this only works once. When I try to run the ChangeUserAgent() method for the second time it doesn&#39;t work. It stays set to the first changed value. This is quite annoying and I&#39;ve tried everything but it just won&#39;t change more than once.

Does anyone know of a different, more flexible approach?

Thanks


All User Agent Solutions on Gang of Coders

Total of 37 User Agent Solutions

Determine a user's timezone