Every time you visit a website, your browser sends a small piece of text that acts like its digital ID card. This is your "User Agent." Our free tool instantly detects and displays your User Agent string, and more importantly, decodes it into easy-to-understand information about your browser, operating system, and device.

How to Use This Tool

Using this tool is completely automatic! The moment you load this page, we detect your browser's user agent string and display it for you.

• The full, raw user agent string is shown in the first text box, ready to be copied.
• Below that, you will find the most important information parsed into a human-readable format.

Example User Agent String

A user agent string can look long and cryptic. Here is an example of what one might look like for a user on Windows running the Chrome browser:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Our tool would parse this string and show you the key information clearly:

• Browser: Chrome 108.0
• Operating System: Windows 10
• Device Type: Desktop

What Is a User Agent?

A User Agent (UA) is a string of text that your web browser sends to every website you visit. It acts as an introduction, telling the web server key details about the software and hardware you are using to access the site. This allows the server to tailor the content for your specific device.

The main purposes of a user agent string are:

• Content Negotiation: The most important use. A web server can detect if you are on a mobile phone and send you the mobile-optimized version of the website, or send a different version for a desktop computer.
• Web Analytics: Services like Google Analytics use the user agent to collect statistics about which browsers and operating systems are most popular among a site's visitors. This helps developers prioritize their testing efforts.
• Bot Detection: While it can be faked, the user agent is one of the first things a server checks to identify web crawlers like Googlebot or Bingbot.
• Browser-Specific Fixes: In the past, developers would use the user agent to apply specific CSS or JavaScript fixes for bugs in a particular browser (e.g., old versions of Internet Explorer). This is less common today but still sometimes necessary.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q1: Why is my user agent string so long and complicated?

The format of the user agent string is a result of decades of internet history. It contains information for backward compatibility. For example, almost every browser includes "Mozilla/5.0" at the beginning to signal that it is compatible with the old Netscape browser rendering engine, even though modern browsers use different engines like Blink (Chrome), Gecko (Firefox), or WebKit (Safari).

Q2: Can I change or "spoof" my user agent?

Yes. Most modern browsers have developer tools that allow you to temporarily change your user agent string. This is extremely useful for web developers who need to test how their site will look and function on different devices (like an iPhone or an Android tablet) without actually owning the physical device.

Q3: Is it safe to share my user agent string?

Generally, yes. The user agent string itself does not contain any personally identifiable information like your name, email, or exact location. However, it is one of many data points that can be used in "browser fingerprinting," a technique to create a unique profile of your device. While not a major security risk on its own, it's a piece of a larger privacy puzzle.