Thursday, June 17, 2010

HTTP User-Agent considered unhelpful

Consider the following User-Agent string:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Flock/3.0.0.3737 Chrome/4.1.249.1071 Safari/532.5

Quick, what is it? The User-Agent string claims to be, variously:
  • Mozilla
  • Flock
  • Chrome
  • Safari
This is some kind of record for misleading/inscrutable User-Agent strings!

The correct answer is Flock, version 3.0 beta.


PS: Between the release version and this new Beta version, Flock switched from being Firefox-based to being based on Chromium.

Here is the User-Agent string for Flock, version 2.6.0:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.19) Gecko/2010061201 Firefox/3.0.19 Flock/2.6.0