User agent sniffing is really tricky and unreliable. We were trying to detect Safari on iOS with something like @qingu's answer above, it did work pretty well for Safari, Chrome and Firefox. But it falsely detected Opera and Edge as Safari. Question: Q: User Agent as Internet Explorer 11 in Safari on MacOS Sierra I am running latest version of macOS Sierra on a late 2012 Mac Mini. My problem is that I need to run an (interactive) website that only works in Internet Explorer 11 as part of one of my jobs as an examiner.

The User-Agent (UA) string is contained in the HTTP headers and is intended to identify devices requesting online content. The User-Agent tells the server what the visiting device is (among many other things) and this information can be used to determine what content to return. Of course this requires using a device detection solution which translates UAs into understandable software and hardware information.

User-Agent list for different device types

There are millions of User-Agent combinations given that UAs change with the software and hardware. For example, a Chrome browser on an iPhone 6 will introduce itself using a different UA than a Safari browser on the same phone.

Every device type, including phones, tablets, desktops, may come with its own UA that makes it possible to detect this device for any purpose. Interestingly bots and crawlers also come with their unique UAs.

Here is a list of example User-Agents for different device types that can be detected. If you’d like to learn more on these devices, just copy and paste the UAs to our User-Agent testing tool. You’ll see all the properties of a detected device.

• E-Readers User Agents

Android Mobile User Agents

If you're wondering which devices are most common where you are, read our list of the world's most popular Android devices.

iPhone User Agents

Below are examples of User Agent strings used by the most popular iPhone devices. As Apple do not pass much info through the User Agent, version numbers don't allow us differentiate between iPhone models.

However, with DeviceAtlas client-side, you can classify these user agents to return correct device model.

Download our free e-book on User Agents to learn:

• What is a User Agent?
• How do you parse them?
• What can you do with them?

For more on how to detect exact iPhone 8/8 Plus and iPhone X models, read our guides on How To Detect iPhone 8/X and how to detect the latest iPhones - the XR, XS and XS Max.

MS Windows Phone User Agents

Tablet User Agents

Safari For Mac User Agent Login

If you're looking for a list of mobile browser user-agents, we've got them too - List Of Mobile Browser User-Agent Strings .

Desktop User Agents

For the web, native apps and mobile operator environments.

Set Top Boxes User Agents

Game Consoles User Agents

Bots and Crawlers User Agents

We've compiled a more in-depth list of User-Agent strings of the most active web crawlers and bots.

E Readers User Agents

Learn more about User-Agents

If you're looking for more information on User-Agents, be sure to read these posts on the DeviceAtlas blog:

Get Instant access to a DeviceAtlas Cloud trial

DeviceAtlas Cloud offer a great way to start detecting mobile device traffic to your site:

• Optimize website content for mobile, tablet, and other devices
• Boost website loading time and minimize page weight
• Handle traffic from any device as you want

Get started with a DeviceAtlas Cloud trial today.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU IPhone OS 12_2 Like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, Like Gecko) Version/12.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Or you could use one of several third-party browsers that let you set the user agent to desktop Safari, such as iCab Mobile.

One of the issues with all third-party browsers in iOS is that javascript performance is several orders of magnitude slower then it is with Safari, because Apple restricts their 'Nitro' JIT compiler to Safari. For this reason, I stick to Safari on iOS devices.

There's an easier way to do this, just install Atomic Web Browser and change the user string. You can set it as Mobile Safari (Default), Safari desktop, Firefox, Explorer or Wap Device; you can even select some specific versions. If you need the function spend some money and don't mess with your backup files. As I mention before, you have to get the payed version, but is only 0.99 and have some other handy functions.
I use this when a mobile site is underdeveloped and basically useless. Anyway, sometimes, the websites are so bloated that Atomic Web becomes very slow, I believe that the same thing would happen with Safari.

I have enough apps, I don't need another one clogging my memory just because I want to view the desktop version of a web page. This hack is excellent.

This hack involves downloading another app, if you read the blog post.

I use the Atomic Web Browser as well. Works great, has a full screen mode, can import Safari's bookmarks and you can use it when set as Desktop Safari to access icloud.com.

I'll also recommend Atomic Web Browser for this. It offers settings to appear as several different browsers. I don't use it a lot, but it's handy just in case.
Rich