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Why does the useragent include this information? I can't see why a website would need to know.

For example:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.04 Chromium/11.0.696.28 Chrome/11.0.696.28 Safari/534.24

Both Firefox and Chromium on Ubuntu do this.

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  • I think only linux does this because this is my windows useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.204 Safari/534.16 – Ja5087 Apr 02 '11 at 07:23
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    So the web server knows to serve 64-bit images. Duh. – ta.speot.is Apr 02 '11 at 07:40

1 Answers1

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This information, when available, is often used by websites to decide which software to recommend you download. If it detects that you have a 64-bit system then it can recommend that you download the 64-bit version of their software.

It is purely down to the useragent (and to some extent the operating system) as to whether it provides this information to the website.

Majenko
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