Behold: the most cursed sentence in all of browser history:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Warp/.69 Chrome/117.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
What you’re looking at is a string of lies… masquerading as a browser ID. Let’s break it down like a forensic linguist trying to understand a dead language written by competing software vendors under the influence of caffeine and market share panic.
Let’s Translate the Madness
Mozilla/5.0
No, your browser isn’t Mozilla. It just pretends to be. Why?
Because back in the 90s, Netscape Navigator was king. Sites started saying, “Only serve cool JavaScript to Netscape, not those lowly Internet Explorer peasants!”
So Microsoft said, “Fine. We’ll just lie and say we’re Mozilla too.” Thus was born the User-Agent arms race, a game of browser cosplay.
Everyone’s Mozilla now.
AppleWebKit/537.36
This means your browser uses Apple’s WebKit engine! Except yours doesn’t. Not really 🙂
You’re using Chromium ( a layout engine ), which forked WebKit into Blink. But to keep sites happy, we keep calling it WebKit. It’s like moving out of your parents’ house, but still using their Netflix login.
KHTML, like Gecko
A historical shoutout to Konqueror, an ancient Linux browser nobody’s seen since the Bush administration. This line basically says: “Hey server! I’m totally like Gecko (Firefox’s engine). Please send me the good CSS.”
It’s like name-dropping someone cool at a party so you get in.
Chrome/117.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
We are Warp, right? Our browser is named Warp. But we have to say we are Chrome and Safari.
Why? Because if you don’t, websites will say:
“Oh… I don’t know what you are. Here’s the mobile site in Comic Sans and no JavaScript. Good luck.”
So we lie. We all lie so websites don’t hurt us.
Our shiny new Warp browser is now part of 30 years of business & politics.
Welcome to the club…
please grab a fake mustache and tell the servers you’re Mozilla.