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What is gzip(gfe) in user agent


I recently see lot of request to my server from browsers with gzip(gfe) in user agent. Which browser uses them in user agent. What it actually do. Some examples below:

  • Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_3_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.1.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1,gzip(gfe)
  • Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0,gzip(gfe)

Solution

  • https://developers.whatismybrowser.com/useragents/parse/#parse-useragent decodes it as "via Google Frontend". An answer to a similar question here on SO says

    You will see this token, if a user translate[s] your website in another language with the Google Translator.

    ...that is when Google makes a request to your site on behalf of the user when the user uses Google Translate to translate your web page. I just tried it and can confirm I see the request with ,gzip(gfe) in the user agent. The referrer looks like: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=es&u=<ORIGINAL URL>