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When I print my ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} at the beginning of each of my perl pages, sometimes it says I'm using IE7 and other times it says I'm using IE8. Any idea why?
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322;
InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648;
.NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322;
InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648;
.NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
My IE version is actually 8.
723
User_agent is the browser+OS version, allowing to distinguish between devices. For example a user is likely to use both phone and laptop, but is unlikely to use windows+apple laptops. It is unlikely that the same session id has multiple useragents.
If a different person on the Internet with the same configuration accesses your website, then their user agent will be the same.
User-Agents also provides one of the data points for fingerprinting users without the use of cookies. It's included with every HTTP request and can potentially be very long and unique to a user in certain uncommon situations.
AppleWebKit/537.36 indicates what browser rendering engine is used. A rendering engine is what transforms HTML into an interactive webpage on the user's screen. The WebKit browser engine was developed by Apple and is primarily used by Safari, Chromium, and all other WebKit-based browsers.
IE 8 will pretend to be IE 7 for backwards compatibility reasons - this is called Compatibility View.
More information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd567845%28VS.85%29.aspx
Compatibility View (and therefore an IE 7 user-agent string) is only enabled for specific websites. To view the list, visit
res://iecompat.dll/iecompatdata.xml
Using your IE browser.
187
IE8 has an IE7 compatibility mode that allows it to work just like and identify itself as IE7. This is so IE8 maintains backwards compatibility with websites that are designed to use the quirks of IE7 and previous versions of Internet Explorer.
How to make IE8 emulate IE7
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Are you using the compatibility mode of IE8 which makes your browser behave like IE7 and present itself as such?
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