Tip of the Day: More about User Agent String

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Today’s Tip…

Yesterday I sent out a tip about using the emulation settings in Internet Explorer, specifically about the user agent string setting.

As it turns out, every single request made to the web server contains  this user agent string.  So I fired up Network Monitor and gathered a couple of frames while going to the Bing site.

This first frame shows the user agent string when the default setting was used.

  Frame: Number = 206, Captured Frame Length = 1514, MediaType = ETHERNET

+ Ethernet: Etype = Internet IP (IPv4),DestinationAddress:[REMOVED],SourceAddress:[REMOVED]

+ Ipv4: Src = REMOVED, Dest = REMOVED, Next Protocol = TCP, Packet ID = 26894, Total IP Length = 1500

+ Tcp: Flags=...A...., SrcPort=49837, DstPort=HTTP(80), PayloadLen=1460, Seq=64201513 - 64202973, Ack=2889698016, Win=1024

- Http: Request, GET https://api.bing.com/qsml.aspx , Query:query=www&maxwidth=32765&rowheight=20&sectionHeight=200&FORM=IE11SS&market=en-US

    Command: GET

  + URI: https://api.bing.com/qsml.aspx?query=www&maxwidth=32765&rowheight=20&sectionHeight=200&FORM=IE11SS&market=en-US

    ProtocolVersion: HTTP/1.1

    Accept: */*

    Accept-Language: en-US

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

    Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, peerdist

    ProxyConnection: Keep-Alive

This second frame shows the user agent string when the setting was changed to Firefox.

  Frame: Number = 95, Captured Frame Length = 1514, MediaType = ETHERNET

+ Ethernet: Etype = Internet IP (IPv4),DestinationAddress:[ REMOVED],SourceAddress:[ REMOVED]

+ Ipv4: Src = REMOVED, Dest = REMOVED, Next Protocol = TCP, Packet ID = 32054, Total IP Length = 1500

+ Tcp: Flags=...A...., SrcPort=50259, DstPort=HTTP(80), PayloadLen=1460, Seq=502007991 - 502009451, Ack=1077802947, Win=1021

- Http: Request, GET https://api.bing.com/qsml.aspx , Query:query=www.&maxwidth=32765&rowheight=20&sectionHeight=200&FORM=IE11SS&market=en-US

    Command: GET

  + URI: https://api.bing.com/qsml.aspx?query=www.&maxwidth=32765&rowheight=20&sectionHeight=200&FORM=IE11SS&market=en-US

    ProtocolVersion: HTTP/1.1

    Accept: */*

    Accept-Language: en-US

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0

    Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, peerdist

    ProxyConnection: Keep-Alive

NOTE:  These frames were cleaned up a bit to remove specific network addresses.