8 ms·
A self-updating list of the most current useragents
Hi Hacker News!
I made a site which displays the most common useragents found on the web.
The site updates weekly with data sourced from the server access logs of another site I run in order to give an accurate picture of the devices and browsers being used on the web.
I do a lot of web scraping in my work and it's this group of people who I had in mind when creating the site.
The data is presented as useragent, browser, os, and relative percentage of occurence. It can be viewed as a table on the site or via json in the API.
Please let me know your thoughts or feedback and I hope you find it useful!
Thanks!
- zagrebian 4y agoWhen it says Windows 10, it could also be Windows 11.
- asddubs 4y agoand mac os can be ios
- dj_mc_merlin 4y agoFirst of all, good job on the project. I do not mean to be too negative, but this: > The site updates weekly with data sourced from the server access logs of another site I run in order to give an accurate picture of the devices and browsers being used on the web. If you only source data from one website, it is not an accurate picture by any means. Consider that other websites have different user bases. Your Firefox usage seems way too high for example, it's likely your other website is largely used by other technical people.
- playingalong 4y agoAFAICT they are not trying to provide current browser usage stats. They are only after having a list of popular browsers which is only a subset of the former. The last paragraph about scraping seems to indicate that. So they only need what is a reasonable UA as of this week. They don't need what is the most popular one.
- stayml 4y agoYes, this too. It should just be a -passable- sample of what's popular and seen on the web
- alostpuppy 4y agoI wonder if we can help crowdsource this.
- kqr 4y agoI would accept this argument if the sample was unbiased but noisy. In this case it's extremely biased but (potentially) low in noise. If people from Uganda aren't part of the target audience of this site, we won't get Ugandan user agents even if they happen to be a fair chunk of web users worldwide (certainly more than in my small but high-tech country.)
- stayml 4y agoThanks! And yep, fair comment, and I had noticed this as well even more so in last week's list. I have been thinking about how I could adjust the numbers in some way to counteract this or add another data source.
- jsnell 4y agoI think it's worse than that. Based on quantization of the percentage field [0], I think the source data has to be about 925 requests and is including all browsers seen at least twice. [0] I.e. look at how many browsers are bunched at 0.22, 0.32, 0.43, 0.54, 0.65 with no entries between.
- kretaceous 4y agoWhat about this?: 1. Run a website like whatsmyuseragent.com 2. Collect all user agents 3. Show the list
- aix1 4y agoThat's certainly workable but, if the intention is to get a representative sample of Internet users, it'd be very biased.
- culi 4y agoit's kinda weird how high Windows Firefox is on the list yet Firefox on mac doesn't make it in the top 50 at all... Do mac users just not use Firefox??
- eitland 4y agoOn Mac I can use Orion so I don't use Firefox that much. Why Orion? 1. It supports tree style tabs (note lower case, I mean the concept, not the extension) natively. (I think you can also use TST, the Firefox extension, as Orion strives to be compatible with Firefox and Chrome extensions). 2. It is not based on Chrome/Chromium, but rather on the built in browser engine on Macs. That said I don't know if it shows up as Safari or if it shows up as its own.
- black3r 4y agoThe OS column comes off as a bit deceptive, because windows 11 still presents as Windows NT 10.0 and newer versions of macOS still present themselves as "Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7", even if you're on an ARM chip..., If you're parsing this info into the OS column, you should probably display this info in there at least with a note, or something like "Windows 10/11", "macOS 10.5 or newer"
- stayml 4y agoGood point, thanks. I'll add that in
- zerocrates 4y agoI was going to say, having read the chart: a little surprising that Windows 11 isn't on here somewhere, wonder if it just advertises as 10.0 still. And apparently it does. I wonder if we can get to a default User-Agent string for a browser where just none of the information it contains is accurate. Lying to say you're "Mozilla 5.0" is ubiquitous, now we've got lying about the version of the OS you're on and lying about the architecture... the only stumbling block is that browsers pretty much all admit who they themselves actually are and their version somewhere. So we need to get a browser that's lying about those things, too.
- black3r 4y agoBrave's user agent string is identical to Chrome's by default, unlike some other Chromium-based browsers like Opera or Edge, which also list their own name.
- zerocrates 4y agoSo Brave on an ARM Mac may already be my holy grail.
- reshie 4y agoit is so easy to spoof and really does not matter in usage except desktop/mobile. there are so many analytics out side that that it is indeed antiquated.
- modeless 4y agoWhere are Android and iOS?
- stayml 4y agoComing soon! I separate them out for now as most scraping tasks require either desktop or mobile useragents and not both together
- n4bz0r 4y ago> most scraping tasks require either desktop or mobile useragents and not both together Why? Do some sites serve completely different content? Or it's simply markup differences? Have never done much scraping and I'd expect the viewport size to be the decisive factor these days, not the user agent. But, again, I don't know much about that.
- jeroenhd 4y agoHow do you control for the faked user agents scrapers use? A bad scraper will be much more common in your logs than a well-behaved browser, after all.
- stayml 4y agoI filter out any user agents that are invalid, but there's no way to see which are real or faked. The access logs include the useragent of every single site visitor - not only errors/bad actors.
- drusepth 4y agoAlways interesting to browse these lists. Figured I'd add this week's browser %s from a site I run to the thread for others interested in another source: > Chrome 62.09% > Safari 26.55% > Edge 3.23% > Opera 2.94% > Firefox 2.64% > Samsung Internet 0.88% > Internet Explorer 0.54% > Android Webview 0.24% > YaBrowser 0.16% Bias: site audience is mostly writers/authors
- userbinator 4y agoI wonder how much of the Chrome is actually Firefox presenting itself as Chrome, because of the increasingly common practice of making sites that attempt to be locked to Chrome but are actually perfectly usable with Firefox if you just switch the UA.
- zerocrates 4y agoProbably very very little... there just aren't that many Firefox users to begin with, and the number that are going to alter the User-Agent is a tiny subset. On your second point, I use a mix of Chrome and Firefox... can't remember the last time I ran into something that didn't work on Firefox. Is mandating Chrome really particularly common?
- _rdvw 4y agoFirefox actually does alter UA on its own, see about:compat
- zerocrates 4y agoI didn't know that, interesting! Definitely would affect one's experience of how common browser-locked sites are. Probably not relevant here though, as they seem to be pulling their data from one site's traffic; if it were on that compatibility list you'd expect to see no Firefox users at all.
- bee_rider 4y agoI agree with you, but it is sort of funny — most of the evidence for Firefox being very rare comes from querying user agents, right? If we were observing the computing universe from the outside, we might speculate that Firefox and spoofing are pretty widespread.
- kgeist 4y ago>macOS 10.15 Catalina Microsoft Edge 108 Do macOS users actually use Edge or it's an error?
- worldsavior 4y agoEdge provides easier access to security, by enabling toggles for disabling JIT for example.
- stayml 4y agoHm! It could just be a parsing error. The useragent in question is like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/108.0.1462.41
- zerocrates 4y agoPretty sure that's the Edge on Mac user-agent.
- systoll 4y agoI tend to oscillate between it and Safari. It’s Chrome with vertical tabs, and that’s better than Chrome.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoI do! I tend to use it as my default Chromium browser because I find it faster/less annoying than Chrome in some aspects (tho over time that gap has closed) and find the dev tools to be a smidge better. In an ideal world we could all use Safari, but it isn’t reliable on too many websites I have to access for work.
- CodeWriter23 4y agoTIL Edge exists for Mac.
- mattl 4y ago
- userbinator 4y agoBesides the other oddities that have been pointed out already, it appears that ChromeOS occurrence is the same as Windows XP.
- abhinavk 4y agoOS field seems a bit off. Windows 11 reports itself as Windows 10 and newer macOS still says it's Catalina in user-agent.
- varenc 4y agoThis is because newer versions of macOS still present themselves as 10.15 (Catalina). A bunch of user agent parsers just assume macOS never goes beyond version 10 and to minimize breakage so they've just frozen the macOS version at "10_15_7". One tell is that if it's Safari 16 it can't actually be on Catalina. Here's a relevant webkit issue: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216593 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216593
- daneel_w 4y ago"What browser are you?" -"I'm Firefox, WebKit, Chrome and Safari. One of those."
- elxx 4y agoAt least everyone can agree that we're all really just standing on the shoulders of Mozilla. In a way, that's beautiful.
- jcfields 4y agoWhat’s so hard to understand about Edge pretending to be Chrome pretending to be Safari, using Blink pretending to be WebKit pretending to be KHTML pretending to be Gecko, all pretending to be Netscape Navigator? I’m the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude.
- banana_giraffe 4y agoSuggestion: Include common headers other than User-Agent and their values in your API. If you want to use the data to act like the latest common browsers, some sites will look to things like Accept and Accept-Encoding to see if you look "normal"
- Klonoar 4y agoThe one thing that should be on here is SEC-UA headers, because these are effectively replacing User-Agent headers and are increasingly necessary for Chrome.
- mattl 4y agoIt would be good to group things by OS/browser. But more sites would be very useful.
- jsdwarf 4y agoThe copy/paste python function looks nice, but why don't you publish this as a package on pip? Would allow for automatic updates through pip vs copying the function manually into my source code every n months. Transparent license/copyright info is another advantage of a package.
- jonathankoren 4y agoUser strings will never not be funny since every string lies because of crappy “Optimized for NETASCAPE 2.0!” code from 1996.
- gus_massa 4y agoIt's very strange that there is like a 70% of Windows 10 and like a 5% of Windows 7, but no Windows 8.
- getcrunk 4y agoIt’s possible that win 8 browsers report their ua as win7. There is no macOS 11+ either on the list, for the reason I mentioned.
- gus_massa 4y agoThis pages https://whatsmyos.com/ https://whatsmyos.com/ report the OS as > Your OS is Windows 8.1* 64-bit > * possibly Windows Server 2012
- Const-me 4y agoI think that might be accurate. Steam survey currently lists following top 5 Windows versions: Win10 x64 65.60% Win11 x64 27.98% Win7 x64 1.88% Win8.1 x64 0.41% Win7 x86 0.11 As you see, the most popular version of Win8 is 4.5 times more exotic than Win7.
- jacob019 4y agoFour and a half times "more exotic"--that's a cool way of phrasing "less popular".
- marcosdumay 4y agoPeople really don't like Windows 8.
- opan 4y agoPeople who were okay with updating to 8 were probably okay to keep updating, while 7 holdouts often think it's the last good version. It reminds me of the Smash Bros. series, where the most commonly played games are always Melee and whatever the new one is. People who played Smash 4 pretty much all moved on to Ultimate, but people who like Melee keep playing it.
- lopkeny12ko 4y agoProud to see Linux + Firefox coming in as the 17th most common UA string! (I truly mean this non-sarcastically--I was expecting this combo to be #30 or even lower)
- melony 4y agoA reminder that all websites under the Stripe.com domain do not work on Opera.
- jacob019 4y agoI'm going to start hitting this "API" once a week to update the UA of my selenium tool that I call bullshit, that I use when I have to automate use of a business partner's website for lack of a proper API.
- sfmike 4y agois there a place with the most trusted browser fingerprints? so best user agent and GPU and other specs to set to?
- quickthrower2 4y agoFunny if it becomes self reinforcing. 1. All the bots use the top UA to stay anonymousish. 2. This increases that UA share causing more of 1 3. Some of the bots are mission critical so humans complain if that UA is rejected so it is always accepted 4. Actual browsers decide to now just send the always accepted UA on any system to ensure the best experience, even as tech changes. 5. 100% of browsers send the 2022 UA top ranked string in 2032!
- vzxvzxvestet 4y ago> Actual browsers decide to now just send the always accepted UA on any system to ensure the best experience Case in point. An issue with Vivaldi browser was reported at the beginning of the year where google search/gmail/etc would show broken pages with links and buttons not working: > Search for example shows the carriage, but does not accept user input. > Gmail opens the page, but does not respond to any clicks to open emails. > Image search doesn't show the images and pretends it's stuck "loading" IIRC the issue was resolved on Vivaldi's side by changing UA to Chrome's for google services.
- TheBrokenRail 4y agoCan we please just freeze the user-agent string all browsers use? (I'd prefer if we could remove it, but we all know that isn't ever happening due to all the old websites.) It's silly that it's almost 2023 and web browsers are still sending legacy-infested nonsense like "(KHTML, like Gecko)" and websites actually change behavior based on it! We have proper APIs for feature detection nowadays, websites shouldn't need to change behavior based on the browser anymore.
- khiqxj 4y agoliterally this. user agents are an obsolete feature (i considered it obsolete around 10-15 years ago) and whenever a new protocol includes it you already know its made by backseat networking "engineers". all user agents do is break more shit because people think they're smart or clever for modulating their machine behavior based on them (blocking, working around broken standards, etc) "there exists a use case that wouldn't be possible to implement without user agents" is not an argument. it's not philosophically valid. its dead obvious that you do not consider the whole picture if you make this argument. why does that 0.1% use case matter? especially given that it's not officially supported. especially given that for the last 10 years, the likes of google have shoved everything _straight_ into the web specs when they started considering it an official supported use case? if you are doing something that's not an official supported use case, why do we need to have hacks to support it? obviously the least ecologically harmful solution is for your use case to not be supported. of course we are talking web here, where scope creep is infinite and the protocols do nothing well instead of one thing well. this is the very problem with the web, that "it doesnt have a concrete use case maaaaan", "ill just add and take what i want as i go", "the web is just the web maaaan you need to think on my wavelength to get it". these people embedded in web actually unironically just make shit up as they go along. they literally operate on an oscillating wave where today feature set 1 is good, tomorrow feature set 2 is good, and the day after, (what is essentially) feature set 1 is good. arguing to have a user agent string is the same idea. this is in strict contrast to a well designed product that actually solves a specific problem, like Standard ML, or a good SQL implementation (disregarding the specification conundrum) or JSON or VGA or TCP.
- laudecum 4y ago
- webprofusion 4y agoWhere are all the mobile browsers? They usually make up about 50% of traffic. I've got a feeling you are sourcing this from a website that has a very specific use and a small userbase. It's nice, but it's wrong?
- gjvc 4y ago"I really would like you to contrast that with what you have to do with HTML on the Internet. Think about it. HTML on the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that should understand its formats. This has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS." -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY&t=1415s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY&t=1415s
- fyresala 4y agoWhat's the data source?
- Tepix 4y agoNice project. It's depressing to see that Firefox on macOS doesn't even make it onto the list.
- lynguist 4y ago#9 1.64% I’m on team macOS/Firefox myself. :)
- sireto 4y agowhat is pct? percentage?
- opan 4y agoThis list will be useful if it stays up-to-date. I find that on qutebrowser and sometimes IceCat that I've had to spoof my UA to get past the CloudFlare browser checks that are unfortunately on many sites these days (such as the GitLab login). Sometimes this workaround quits working and I suspect my old UA gets treated as more suspicious over time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- davide_v 4y agoThank you for this, I always struggled to find an up to date list of UA. If you don't mind, I made a simple Node.js wrapper of this API and released as a NPM package, you can find it here: https://github.com/DavideViolante/useragents-me-api/ https://github.com/DavideViolante/useragents-me-api/
- lynguist 4y agoWhen you collate this to OS/Browser you get this (sorted by highest ranking mention): - 1 Windows/Chrome 42.63% - 2 Windows/Edge 17.58% - 3 macOS/Chrome 9.03% - 4 macOS/Safari 16.42% - 5 Windows/Firefox 8.85% - 6 macOS/Firefox 1.64% - 7 Linux/Chrome 0.83% - 8 Linux/Firefox 0.72% - 9 Windows/Internet Explorer 1.04% - 10 Windows/Yandex Browser 0.42% - 11 Chrome OS/Chrome 0.21% - 12 Linux/Opera 0.21% And: Windows: 70.52% macOS: 27.09% Linux: 1.76% Chrome OS: 0.21% - - - Chrome: 52.7% Edge: 17.58% Safari: 16.42% Firefox: 11.21% Internet Explorer: 1.04% Yandex Browser: 0.42% Opera: 0.21%
- gyulai 4y agoI wouldn't have thought that Linux swings a whole 1.76% (not being sarcastic here)