User agent

Short description: Software acting on behalf of a user

On the Web, a user agent is a software agent capable of and responsible for retrieving and facilitating end user interaction with Web content.[1] This includes all common web browsers, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari, some email clients, standalone download managers like youtube-dl, other command-line utilities like cURL, and arguably headless services that power part of a larger application, such as a web crawler.

The user agent plays the role of the client in a client–server system. The HTTP User-Agent header is intended to clearly identify the agent to the server. However, this header can be omitted or spoofed, so some websites use other agent detection methods.

## See also

* User-Agent header

## References

1. ↑ "W3C Definition of User Agent". www.w3.org. 2011-06-16. https://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/work/wiki/Definition_of_User_Agent.

## External links

* User agent at Mozilla web docs

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