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Cover image for Edge's lost "E"
Paul
Paul

Posted on

14 4

Edge's lost "E"

It's not news that Edge is rebranding itself. We've all read about its new icon (and maybe ranted about its similarity to Firefox's), but I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about its other lost E...

I was looking at the user-agent string for the new Edge, the one using the Chromium renderer:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3974.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/80.0.345.0
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And I noticed something... interesting. For comparison, here is the current Edge's (the one using EdgeHTML) user-agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.18362
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Did you see it? There's a lot there -- and I could spend a whole post ranting about all the spoofing going on here (and in all major browsers' user-agents, to be honest), but look at the last browser name. Old Edge declares itself as "Edge," nothing weird there, but new Edge declares itself as "Edg." This will ensure that any user-agent-sniffing scripts looking for "Edge" won't target the new, Chromium-powered browser.

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