A user agent is a computer program representing a person, for example, a browser in a Web context.
Besides a browser, a user agent could be a bot scraping webpages, a download manager, or another app accessing the Web. Along with each request they make to the server, browsers include a self-identifying User-Agent HTTP header called a user agent (UA) string. This string often identifies the browser, its version number, and its host operating system.
Spam bots, download managers, and some browsers often send a fake UA string to announce themselves as a different client. This is known as user agent spoofing.
The user agent string can be accessed with JavaScript on the client side using the navigator.userAgent property.
A typical user agent string looks like this: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0".
(Source: Mozilla.org)
Platform identifiers change based on the operating system being used, and version numbers also increment as time passes. Mapping UA string tokens to a more human-readable browser name for use in code is a common pattern on the web today.
The landscape of mobile browsers is quite complex, with several major players (pre-installed in most cases) and a number of locally popular contenders. While all phones come with pre-installed browsers, both Google Play and Apple App Store offer a number of alternative browsers, some focusing on speed and lightness, others on saving bandwidth and blocking ads, and an ever-increasing amount claiming to increase privacy and reduce a users' mobile digital footprint.
Version of everything, eventually (e.g. browser reset CSS by Eric Meyer, et al.), so perhaps there is for this as well. Some servers have $_SERVER as not set, so make sure to check if empty first Readability is important to us, so we are using this instead of others complex regex.
It’s all great if we just fetch HTML and parse it with cheerio. Now, we need to scrape a website with JS enabled, because website is doing black magic client side rendering.
The Chrome (or Chromium/Blink-based engines) user agent string is similar to Firefox’s. For compatibility, it adds strings like HTML, like Gecko and Safari.
It’s all great if we just fetch HTML and parse it with cheerio. Now, we need to scrape a website with JS enabled, because website is doing black magic client side rendering.
The last row in the panel UI is dedicated for the control options including a button to change the UA to its default value. Moreover, you can specify a particular URL or domain so that UA is only applied to that URL or domain (read FAQ for detailed description)e. There is also a status-bar in the panel to show the current UA and other info as you move the mouse within the popup UI.f.
Changing the user agent string can be useful in certain scenarios when some website's functionality is locked down to the specific platform and you need to bypass the restriction. This allows developers to differentiate various device classes like tablets, phones, Desktop PCs and laptops, and more.
Changing the user agent string can be useful in certain scenarios when some website's functionality is locked down to the specific platform and you need to bypass the restriction. In today's article, we will learn how to change the user agent string in the popular Opera browser.
If you ever wanted to make your web traffic seem like it was coming from a different browser–say, to trick a site that claims it’s incompatible with yours–you can. This allows you to request web pages intended for different browsers–or even different devices, like smartphones and tablets.