You're welcome to do just that.. md5(useragent) and keep your own definitions... be mindful that in IE in particular plugins affect the string itself. :-(
Re:User-agent string changes
by firepacket on Saturday November 22, 2014 @05:36PM
(#8646912)
You mean a super cookie?
Not only would this violate tracking laws in some areas, but who would ever want to use such a thing?
Re:User-agent string changes
by tacostakohashi on Saturday November 22, 2014 @08:05PM
(#8647378)
No. Generated at the time the browser executable is built (by the vendor, linux distro, etc), and hence shared by all the people using that browser executable. So, only good for identifying the browser, platform, OS and features, and much less so the users.
That way, analytics vendors or libraries could maintain a database that maps IDs to specific browsers releases, platforms, features, etc if they care about those things enough, but short-sighted web admins would have no hope of doing anything with primitive regex matching of the UA string.