Wednesday, September 3, 2008

The UserAgent Signature from the Google Chrome browser

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I guess many of us with access to webserver logs or tracking tools have looked curiously after the first visitors using the brand new Google Chrome browser - but what should we look for?

I just did a quick check and here's a log entry on an Apache2 HTTP server, when i visit it with my new installed Chrome browser on Windows XP:

*.*.*.* - - [03/Sep/2008:17:02:49 +0200] 
"GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 17237 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13"

which with my Firefox2 browser would be like:

*.*.*.* - - [03/Sep/2008:17:26:23 +0200] 
"GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 15101 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 Firefox/2.0.0.16"

There's not much to conclude except that the main browing capability Mozilla/5.0 is the same. A more odd observation is that whereas Chrome is still struggling to get to the infantil version 0.3 the AppleWebKit is much more mature with the three digit version 525.13.

My personal opinion on Chrome is that it's much like firefox (and IE) and I'm not are heavy user of complex AJAX sites, so I'm not expected feel much difference. The load times are fine, but I miss my favorite addons and I haven't had time to check the featureset more closely. By the way this is my first blogentry done with Chrome.

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