User Agent

This week we have been looking at the browser detection for the Sony PS Vita. We've found that on occasion two different browsers can use the same user agent, ultimately proving that you need the advanced user agent parsing that 51Degrees provides in order to correctly identify all device ID combinations.

Friday 4th March 2016 saw 180 web professionals all with an interest in progressive enhancement assemble in London for a one day conference organised by Simon McManus.

"The Web is the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable." - Douglas Crockford

I continue to be amazed at how the humble User-Agent is misunderstood. My purpose in writing this blog post is to reset some myths passed down from web professional to web professional over the years concerning User-Agents. This was typified in the debate and conversation I witnessed at Enhance Conference.

Every day consumer electronic vendors fuel the growing demand for smartphones, tablets and smartwatches by releasing new web enabled devices. From the mighty Apple iPhone and iPad to the relative smaller-scale like Gionee, Oppo and Fly, 51Degrees research their devices and enter the device specifications and other information into our database.

For many marketers it's essential to know how each device and platform is performing. 51Degrees provide a tool which aggregates usage information from over 3 billion unique web visits per month and shows vendors exactly how their models are performing by country and month. This information differs to sales figures and show real usage of the web.

We have removed all outdated user agents from our system. You should find the data file size is now slightly smaller. Detection accuracy and speed won't be affected.

Learn what user agent spoofing is and why it works well with device detection. See examples of user agents and how a change in a user agent string is likely to influence the detection result.

Device detection is usually expected to take a user agent as an input and use it to return a device with the relevant properties. But what if you want to find signatures/user agent strings associated with a particular property? Read this article to find out how to use your 51Degrees data file to retrieve device signatures based on specific strings, contained in selected properties.