What is the User Agent string name for Microsoft Edge?

mobile microsoft-edge user-agent
Zvonimir Matic picture Zvonimir Matic · Jun 2, 2015 · Viewed 78.5k times · Source

I'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, "IE Mobile" identifies the mobile version of the Internet Explorer).

Answer

Dave Voyles picture Dave Voyles · Jul 7, 2015

Microsoft Edge UA string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10136

I detail why in this blog post.

Neowin recently reported that Microsoft’s new browser for Windows 10, Spartan, uses the Chrome UA string, “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0″. That is done on purpose.

You’ll also notice that the entire string ends with “Edge/12.0″, which Chrome does not.

I should point out, that this isn’t a radical departure from what Microsoft did with IE 11, which on Windows 8 reads: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko, as explained in this post.

What is User Agent sniffing?

Often, web developers will UA sniffing for browser detection. Mozilla explains it well on their blog:

Serving different Web pages or services to different browsers is usually a bad idea. The Web is meant to be accessible to everyone, regardless of which browser or device they’re using. There are ways to develop your web site to progressively enhance itself based on the availability of features rather than by targeting specific browsers.

Here’s a great article explaining the history of the User Agent.

Often, lazy developers will just sniff for the UA string and disable content on their website based on which browser they believe the viewer is using. Internet Explorer 8 is a common point of frustration for developers, so they will frequently check if a user is using ANY version of IE, and disable features.

The Edge team details this even deeper on their blog.

All user agents strings contain more information about other browsers than the actual browser you are using – not just tokens, but also ‘meaningful’ version numbers.

Internet Explorer 11’s UA string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Microsoft Edge UA string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10136

The userAgent property has been aptly described as “an ever-growing pack of lies” by Patrick H. Lauke in W3C discussions. (“or rather, a balancing act of adding enough legacy keywords that won’t immediately have old UA-sniffing code falling over, while still trying to convey a little bit of actually useful and accurate information.”)

We recommend that web developers avoid UA sniffing as much as possible; modern web platform features are nearly all detectable in easy ways. For example, the Modernizr

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