can a windows computer have a mac user agent?

Question

I tried to search for this but I didn't find anything (which could simply be because I'm not sure what terms to use to search), so I hope this doesn't annoy anyone!

I have an IP tracker on my blog and I'm trying to figure out the identity of a regular visitor (within reason, of course! I know that information can't tell you a lot!). I'm rather confident of who it is based on various non-IP related clues, but the one thing that throws me off is that it shows the person as having a user agent that is apparently associated with Macs.

This is the user agent in question: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_3) AppleWebKit/536.28.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.3 Safari/536.28.10

Now, I'm not psychic or anything, haha, but I'm pretty sure the person I thought it was does not have a Mac OS X. So I was wondering how reliable user agents are for determining the operating system and if it is possible for a Windows OS to have a Mac user agent WITHOUT the person manually going in to change their own user agent or installing a plugin. If not, I guess I was wrong about who it was, lol!

Thank you for your help and, again, I'm sorry if this is a really obvious question; I really did try my best to search!

Answer 1

A properly functioning browser will transmit a proper user agent for a properly-functioning machine, if that's what you're asking.

If they didn't do something to intentionally change their own user agent (which is very easy- it's one of the first options in the developer menu in Safari on OS X), then the browser should transmit the proper user agent of the machine, if it is working properly.

But that doesn't really help you much, does it?

Answer 2

Information about user-agent is a simple string that your system send with request to the server. So there are lot of possibilities to change user-agent manually: from browser addons, to the requests created by-hand.