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I'm looking for info about what the first major version of Edge was, that used Chromium? What does the useragent string look like between the two versions/how did the UA change? Was it purely a version number change, or did some other element of it change too?

I have to educate some people as to how to recognize "Chromium based Edge" versus "non-Chromium based Edge" from the user agent string alone.. At the moment I believe the indicator for this is the UA string referring to windows/mac as well as Edg/ rather than the full word, apparently a by design behavior

Caius Jard
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1 Answers1

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User agent strings do not identify early versions of Microsoft Edge, since the Microsoft developers at the beginning left the Chrome user agent string as-is.

In Edge version 12, they adopted the Edge/ string and the first one was:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10240
(source).
This version was also called EdgeHTML and was not based on Chromium.

For the real Chromium-based Edge, they moved to edg/ in version 75, and this became:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3739.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/75.0.109.0
(source).

You can read about the history of the Edge browser and all its versions in
Wikipedia Microsoft Edge.

For comparison, here are some user agent strings from a Stack Overflow answer from May 2019.

The Chrome browser userAgent:

mozilla/5.0 (windows nt 10.0; win64; x64) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/74.0.3729.169 safari/537.36

The Edge browser userAgent:

mozilla/5.0 (windows nt 10.0; win64; x64) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/64.0.3282.140 safari/537.36 edge/18.17763

The Microsoft Chromium Edge Dev userAgent:

mozilla/5.0 (windows nt 10.0; win64; x64) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/76.0.3800.0 safari/537.36 edg/76.0.167.1

The Microsoft Chromium Edge Canary userAgent:

mozilla/5.0 (windows nt 10.0; win64; x64) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/76.0.3800.0 safari/537.36 edg/76.0.167.1

harrymc
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    It appears the first version is Chromium Edge 75, depends if we’re talking, development or stable though – Ramhound May 18 '20 at 12:08