![]() User-Agent Client Hints enable access to the same information but in a more privacy-preserving way, in turn enabling browsers to eventually reduce the User-Agent string's default of broadcasting everything. # Introducing the new User-Agent Client Hints These issues also disproportionately hurt users of less common browsers, as sites may have failed to test against their configuration. It is unstructured, so parsing it results in unnecessary complexity, which is often the cause for bugs and site compatibility issues that hurt users. There's also a need to improve web compatibility when it comes to the User-Agent string. However, it is also critical that users' privacy is protected against covert tracking methods, and sending UA information by default goes against that goal. The User-Agent string enables many legitimate use cases, and serves an important purpose for developers and site owners. The lower your resulting "Similarity ratio" is, the more unique your requests are, the easier it is for servers to covertly track you. If you test your own browser at AmIUnique, you can see just how closely your User-Agent string identifies you. ![]() The combination of these parameters with the sheer diversity of possible values means the User-Agent string could contain enough information to allow individual users to be uniquely identified. ![]() The above string contains information about the user's operating system and version, the device model, the browser's brand and full version, enough clues to infer it's a mobile browser, and not to mention a number of references to other browsers for historical reasons. We can see that when looking at Chrome's current User-Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux Android 10 Pixel 3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 Over the intervening decades, this string has accrued a variety of additional details about the client making the request (as well as cruft, due to backwards compatibility). ![]() This header was intended to specify, in order of significance, the product (e.g. This was defined all the way back in 1996 (RFC 1945 for HTTP/1.0), where you can find the original definition for the User-Agent string, which includes an example: User-Agent: CERN-LineMode/2.15 libwww/2.17b3 When web browsers make requests they include information about the browser and its environment so that servers can enable analytics and customize the response. If you are already using User-Agent Client Hints, be aware that since Chrome 90 the header format has changed so the Accept-CH tokens must exactly match the returned headers. ![]()
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