Glossary

User-agent client hints

Chromium's structured replacement for the user-agent string: a set of Sec-CH-UA request headers and a JavaScript API that report the browser, platform and hardware separately.

Also called: UA-CH, Sec-CH-UA.

The user-agent string was one long line that everybody parsed badly, so Chromium split it up. User-agent client hints send a small set of low-entropy headers on every request — the browser brand list, whether the device is mobile, the platform name — and hold back the detailed ones until a site asks for them with an Accept-CH response header. Those high-entropy hints cover the platform version, the CPU architecture, the device model and the full browser version. The same values are readable from script through the userAgentData interface.

For anyone running separate identities this is the most common place a setup contradicts itself, because there are now two accounts of the same facts and a tool that changes only the user-agent string leaves the hints reporting the real machine. A site does not need to be clever to catch it; it just compares them. Argus generates the user-agent and the client-hint metadata together from the same preset, as part of the coordinated identity described on the fingerprints page, so the two halves agree by construction rather than by being edited in step.