Does Edge show in the Google "Recently used devices" list as "Safari 537.36"?

The Google Account "Recently used devices" list shows a sign-in from Safari 537.36 on Windows. However, I don't use Safari (and Wikipedia says the last Windows version of Safari was in 2010). Microsoft Edge (Windows 10) has been used to log in to the account, and I am thinking Google is incorrectly recognizing Edge as Safari. The Edge User-Agent string does include Safari/<ver> per MSDN.

Can anyone confirm or deny my hypothesis? Any official statements from Google on their algorithm for parsing User-Agent strings?

3 Answers

According to this list of Edge user agent strings—reproduced below—the answer is yes: If you see a user agent string such as Safari 537.36, you might be using Edge. Why “might?” Read on…

As for why this is done, my head is still spinning from my basic research, but according to this Pro Webmasters post as well as this blog post, it seems like Microsoft Edge developers are attempting to get Edge to be recognized by apps that “sniff” user agent strings as a “modern browser.” Thus the “Safari/537.36” and “Chrome/39.0.2171.71” seem to be declarations or browser capabilities and compatibility.

So for all intents and purposes, Edge is desperately saying, “Hey! I’m not Internet Explorer! I can do cool stuff like other modern web browsers!”

And here are those headache inducing Edge user agent strings.

Edge

• Edge on Windows 10 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0
• Edge on Windows 10 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0

Edge 20.1

• Edge 20.1 on Windows 7 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10240
• Edge 20.1 on Windows 10 - 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
• Edge 20.1 on Windows 8.1 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10240 Edge 20.1 on Windows 8 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10240
• Edge 20.1 on Windows XP - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10240
• Edge 20.1 on Windows Vista - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10240
• Edge 20.1 on Windows 10 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10240

Edge 25.1

• Edge 25.1 on Windows 7 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586
• Edge 25.1 on Windows 10 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586
• Edge 25.1 on Windows 8.1 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586
• Edge 25.1 on Windows XP - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586
• Edge 25.1 on Windows 8 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586
• Edge 25.1 on Windows Vista - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586
• Edge 25.1 on Windows 10 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586
• Edge 25.1 on Windows Phone 10.0 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 10.0; Android 4.2.1; Microsoft; Lumia 950) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586

It's pretty normal for a browser to have many entries in the "User Agent" strings. Navigate to this website to see what Edge normally reports as

Edge on Windows 10 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0