&quot;...user agent strings are a giant disaster of technical debt&quot;<p>Amen.<p>I agree with the commenter below who suggests we use random strings instead.  Unless there is some sort of published standard for what this header should contain and what each byte means, the contents may as well be random.<p>The &quot;history&quot; of &quot;user-agents&quot; (about 20 years) is not very long, assuming the web is going to last more than 20 years into the future.  Taking a long view, we are still in the nascent phase.