Wow - 7 years old. What started out as a goofy idea of narrating user agents in our web traffic logs has grown so much in 7 years.
Not to mention that four our seventh birthday, we found our one-millionth user agent to put us into seven-digits!
We are now sitting at over 1 million user agents, of which 20,000+ are identified as bots.
The most notable change in the last seven years has to be the nature of devices that we see from our sites and
contributing sites.
In the early days, most user agents were either Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, or some form of Mozilla, and everything else was pretty much bots or proxies.
Now looking over our categories, mobile and non-PC user agents seem to be the most diverse and rapid changing.
In our first two or three years we never saw advertising, spamming, or
script injection attempts in user agents.
Since the Script Injections category appeared, it has grown rapidly, and the number of user agents containing spam has also been a challenge to weed out from useful data.
We've come a long way from the days where we just wanted to know if you were Netscape Gold 3 or Netscape Navigator 4, and if your browser was capable of handling that new-fangled concept of client-side JavaScript.
As always, thanks to our
site contributors who take the time to send us their data to mine through, and to our readers - we hope that you continue to find our site useful in the coming years!
Over the next few weeks and months, we'll focus on posting about different areas that have changed in the User Agents realm over the past few years.
Look for posts to focus on different user agents from phones, tablet and touch enabled devices, gaming consoles, and last but not least, bots!
At seven years of operation, we now have
1,000,047 user agents and
20,014 bots tracked to date!