Bing Announces new bingbot user-agents

[phranque]

Announcing future user-agents for Bingbot [blogs.bing.com]

As announced in October, Bing is adopting the new Microsoft Edge as the engine to run JavaScript and render web pages. We have already switched to Microsoft Edge for thousands of web sites “under the hood”.
...

So far, we were crawling using an existing bingbot user-agents. With this change, we will start the transition to a new bingbot user-agent, first for sites which require it for rendering and then gradually and carefully to all sites.

[engine]

Good to know.

For reference...

In addition to the existing user-agents listed above, following are the new evergreen Bingbot user-agents

Desktop
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36 Edg/W.X.Y.Z

Mobile
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 Edg/W.X.Y.Z (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

October announcement.
[webmasterworld.com...]

[not2easy]

I am curious about what

sites which require it for rendering

might refer to - are these proprietary sites not intended for the public - such as their cloud Office services? Just trying to understand what that might mean.

[NickMNS]

I am curious about what
sites which require it for rendering

@not2easy
I would guess that this refers to websites that are single page apps, where js is required to run in order to show the content.

[not2easy]

Thank you NickMNS you're probably right, but don't their previous UAs render js? Are they just now looking a the content of js or not sure of their newer UAs? Seems odd given the long term use of scripts. I thought their UAs have been able to render script content for some time. Maybe I'm misreading or misconstruing it. That happens.

[lucy24]

Not to mention...

It’s a robot. There’s no human looking at what gets crawled; it gets sent along to some other part of the system for rendering. There is therefore no inherent connection between the text contained in the user-agent string, and the information the search engine ultimately gleans from your site.

The only possible effect of changing your UA is on those rare sites that send fundamentally different content depending on the visitor’s UA string--which must be vanishingly rare for anything other than, say, checking for the presence of “Android” or “iPhone” or the like. (Or, of course, blocking requests that claim to be MSIE 5, FIrefox 4 or something equally implausible. But that's more of an issue for the various googloid functions that identify themselves as some extremely elderly Chrome.)

[iamlost]

Gotta love some decisions...

A decade ago MSFT developed their Chakra JScript JavaScript engine for IE9; when they developed a replacement (fork of the foregoing) for Edge they kept the same Chakra name...

However, none of that matters since Edge switched to Chromium rendering last year and it's V8 JavaScript engine.

I read So far, we were crawling using an existing bingbot user-agents. With this change, we will start the transition to a new bingbot user-agent as anouncing the change from bingbot using Chakra to a new bingbot using the Chromium V8 JavaScript engine.

I read first for sites which require it for rendering and then gradually and carefully to all sites as ironic:
Best viewed in IE
->
Chromium required for viewing
But I may be reading too much into a sentence segment...

[NickMNS]

Thank you NickMNS you're probably right, but don't their previous UAs render js?

I have no idea, I have never really worried much about Bingbot. They have never sent me much traffic, and even if my sites ranked well the amount of traffic would likely still be less than sufficient. So I have never really bothered, the best I would do is make sure that something remotely readable was displayed in IE/Edge. I am very pleased that they are switching to the Chromium engine, now I can forget about IE completely.

I also don't depend on the bots to render my pages. I'm not sure how Bing will be handling render/crawling but Google still recommends to prerender content for Googlebot, unless you can afford to wait as rendering happens slowly and can take some time before it is even started.

[Pjman]

What is bing?

[lucy24]

What is bing?

Surely you've seen the ads? “We’re #2: We Try Harder.”

[archiweb]

“...bingbot user-agent, first for sites which require it...” most likely refers to web components, PWA, etc.