User Agent Spoofing
The popularity of various Web browser products has varied throughout the Web's history, and this has influenced the design of Web sites in such a way that Web sites are sometimes designed to work well only with particular browsers, rather than according to uniform standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) or the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Web sites often include code to detect browser version to adjust the page design sent according to the user agent string received. This may mean that less-popular browsers are not sent complex content (even though they might be able to deal with it correctly) or, in extreme cases, refused all content. Thus, various browsers have a feature to cloak or spoof their identification to force certain server-side content. For example, the Android browser identifies itself as Safari (among other things) in order to aid compatibility.
Other HTTP client programs, like download managers and offline browsers, often have the ability to change the user agent string.
Spam bots and Web scrapers often use fake user agents.
At times it has been popular among Web developers to initiate Viewable With Any Browser campaigns, encouraging developers to design Web pages that work equally well with any browser.
A result of user agent spoofing may be that collected statistics of Web browser usage are inaccurate.
Read more about this topic: User Agent
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