Why doesn't Windows NT 11 show up in user-agent string?

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Why doesn't Windows NT 11 show up in user-agent string?

SumGuy

2:06 am on Sep 11, 2025 (gmt 0)

Something came up that made me look back for some UA examples and I widened the scope until I got down to looking for this string:

Windows NT 11

I have a grand total of 10 log-lines with that string in the UA. They're all from this year. They're all a little different, the most common varient is this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 11.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/

There's a couple of these:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 11.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/

And one example each of these odd-balls:

Opera/8.97.(Windows NT 11.0; az-AZ) Presto/2.9.180 Version/10.00
Opera/9.41.(Windows NT 11.0; ka-GE) Presto/2.9.170 Version/12.00

Looking instead for Windows NT 10 gives an uncountably high number of log-lines.

Why have "the powers that be" chosen to not bestow a user-agent with Windows NT 11 ?

Another bot UA fingerprint to throw on the pile...

lucy24

6:19 am on Sep 11, 2025 (gmt 0)

This is not unique to Windows. My UA, for example, comes through as

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:142.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/142.0

which is Firefox’s way of saying “Mac OS 13.7.8, Firefox 142.0.1”. Or, in the alternative,

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Safari/605.1.15

which is exactly the same thing, mutatis mutandis.

:: wandering off to figure out why on earth I was 403’d at my own site ::

(Answer: Well, oops. Guess that wasn’t a robot-diagnostic header after all.)

SumGuy

12:49 am on Sep 12, 2025 (gmt 0)

Was this Micro$oft's way of making Windoze-11 adoption rate not measurable?

Brett_Tabke

6:17 pm on Sep 15, 2025 (gmt 0)

That is entirely due to Google's coding in Chrome - little to do with Microsoft.

They do it for compatibility.

lucy24

6:29 pm on Sep 15, 2025 (gmt 0)

Google's coding in Chrome

This does not explain the UA strings sent by Firefox and Safari. But I agree that, since the UA is sent by the browser, it can hardly be blamed on the OS, whatever it may happen to be.

Brett_Tabke

1:36 am on Sep 16, 2025 (gmt 0)

sorry - thought we were talking chrome only.

True - ff and safari both do use win 10.

You can detect win 11 with the request header "Sec-CH-UA-Platform-Version" but not the ua string.

lucy24

4:52 am on Sep 16, 2025 (gmt 0)

You can detect win 11 with the request header "Sec-CH-UA-Platform-Version"

Ugh, you mean that header actually means something? I thought it was just another thing they pile on to make it harder to tell robots from humans :(

:: quick side trip to logged headers ::

No Sec-CH-UA-Platform-Version. I do find some Sec-Ch-Ua-Platform-Version, cased like that (wrong casing remains a good robot diagnostic), but
:: business with calculator ::
98% of those are blocked robots, and I have grave doubts about the other 2%.

tangor

12:32 am on Sep 17, 2025 (gmt 0)

Gosh... I am reporting Win 10...

Why? Still running it. Sadly this hardware won't take 11, but that means I will continue to accurately report Win 10!

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