Chrome User Agent suddenly showing Windows 10 instead of 7

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[Moonbear]

The the OS line on the Chrome Version page shows that I’m still on Windows 7 but the User Agent now looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Shouldn’t it be Windows NT 6.1?

I know the user agent can be changed, but I didn’t change it.

It was still showing as Windows 7 when I checked my Gmail Sunday night.

Do I need to worry about this?

 

I decided to check if running chrome as Admin would also show the User Agent as Windows NT 10.0 and surprisingly it did not.

 

A second check of the Admin run Chrome now shows Windows NT 10.0  in the User agent there as well.

 

• This topic was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by Moonbear.
• This topic was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by Moonbear.

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It is strange.

Do you have an addons installed in Chrome?

Have you check if it was change on chrome by other user and turn it off?

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Maybe the reason is that Chrome stopped supporting Windows 7.

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That’s true, but what reason could there be for changing the User Agent on an unsupported system?

Can the change cause any issues?

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Google has been planning to phase out the useragent for some time now. I would guess that this is a move toward that end. They will be moving more and more toward a genericized useragent that does not reflect the specific system at hand, so that webmasters have to utilize other methods to deliver appropriate content. Once that is done, it won’t matter what the string says.

I do not foresee that as a problem. Most web servers would not legitimately need to know the specific version of Windows you use anyway, with the exception of tech support sites guessing what support page you need. You can always manually navigate to where you need to be on those. If anything, telling sites you use 10 it could head off nags from web sites that would complain about you using an OS they believe to be out of date.

I’ve been a critic of the practice of useragent sniffing for a long time, so I welcome the idea of deprecating them in principle. It is a practice that has been abused from the start, and it is that very abuse that is the reason that every browser claims to be Mozilla/5.0, and why Chrome claims to use not just be Mozilla/5.0, but also Safari, and Chrome (the one time it actually means it)… and also that it uses AppleWebKit, and KHTML, and Gecko (it says “like Gecko,” but useragent sniffers looking for “Gecko” don’t care about the word “like.”), when it actually uses none of those. Chrome uses Blink, the only major layout engine that is not mentioned by Chrome’s useragent string. It is a fork of AppleWebKit, which in turn is a fork of KHTML, but it’s not either of those anymore.

That said, I have strong misgivings over one single company having the power to unilaterally declare an end to an established practice (even a bad one) by fiat. The same company that has monopolies on web search and web advertising also has a monopoly on web browsers on Android and Windows, the largest mobile and PC operating systems worldwide, and this gives them tremendous power. They own the search engine to drive traffic to their chosen sites, the browser people use once they get there (which affects the user’s ability to resist ads and tracking), and they also deliver the ads and trackers when the users get there.

But that’s another topic.

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Moonbear

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Okay, I had no clue Google had that in the works.

I did manage to find the user agent settings in the developer tools and its set to use the browser default, so I’m thinking you might be right about the increased generalization picking up.

 

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Moonbear wrote:

but what reason could there be for changing the User Agent on an unsupported system?

Maybe so that sites that block now browsers running on Windows 7 (and 8.1) won’t block your PC.

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Moonbear

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The User agent section in Network conditions in developer tools has the use browser default box ticked so I’m thinking that’s whats happening.

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To whom it may concern who posted an anonymous post using my email address.  This will not be tolerated.  This space is a respectful place and I want respectful people to participate.  I respect your privacy, so respect MY email address and any other person’s email address.  You can use anon@askwoody.com but abusing and impersonating anyone is over the lines and will NOT be tolerated.

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Ascaris

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