Glossary

User agent

A string a browser sends identifying itself, its version and the operating system, from which device and browser breakdowns are derived.

It is parsed by pattern matching, which has an ordering trap that catches most implementations. Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi and Samsung Internet all contain the word Chrome, because they are all Chromium, so a parser that checks for Chrome first reports every one of them as Chrome. A dashboard with a suspiciously round Chrome share and no Edge at all is showing you that bug.

The string is also getting deliberately less informative. Browsers have been freezing and trimming what they report for years, moving the detail behind User-Agent Client Hints, which a server has to ask for.

Bots and link preview fetchers send user agents too. The well-behaved ones identify themselves and can be filtered; the rest cannot.