Guide 189 · Reports · GA4 + Tag Manager
Read the Tech details report: browser, device, operating system and screen resolution
The Tech details report shows the technology your visitors used — browser, device, operating system and screen resolution — one row per technology, ranked by users.
After step 5, you can name the top browser, the top device category, and the screen resolution most of your visitors actually use — and say whether the small rows are worth designing for.
Download the reference: the Tech details reference (JSON) (1868 bytes, MD5 5225251b1a47c1614d9c4c7a2a9f7d14). It holds the report or event definition and the worked example with the recomputed figures shown on this page.
What you need
- Viewer access or above on the property.
- The report path: Reports, then Tech, then Tech details. It sits in the User collection, beside the Tech overview.
- The default dimension: Browser. The dropdown above the table switches it to Device category, Operating system, Screen resolution, Device model, and the rest.
The trace
- Open the report. Sign in, click Reports, then Tech, then Tech details. The table lists one row per browser, ranked by active users. The chart above the table shows users by browser over time.
- Read the overview first, then the detail. The Tech overview beside this report shows the same technology as summary cards — Users by Platform, Users by Browser, Users by Device category, Users by Screen resolution. The cards tell you what to look at; the detail table tells you the numbers behind each card. A card and its table row must agree: if the Users by Browser card says Chrome leads, the detail table's top row must be Chrome.
- Switch the dimension to answer the question you actually have. For the device split, switch the primary dimension to Device category: desktop, mobile, tablet. For the design question, switch it to Screen resolution — the width and height in pixels of the screen the visit came from, for example
1920x1080,1440x900,1366x768. For the operating system split, switch it to Operating system. One report, one switch at a time; each switch re-ranks the rows. - Read the rate beside the count. A browser with many users and a low engagement rate is a different story from a browser with few users and a high one. The worked example below recomputes the engagement rate and the key event rate for four browsers, so a big row can be read as a rate before anyone calls it the audience.
- Check what a row cannot tell you. Every dimension in this report is populated automatically from the tag — browser, device category, operating system, screen resolution, device model, platform, OS version. Nothing here is typed in by a visitor, and nothing here names a person: the rows are technologies, not people. If a row is missing, the tag never collected that value; no setting in the report creates it.
Dead ends
DEAD END — READING THE OVERVIEW CARDS AS THE DETAIL TABLE. The Tech overview cards are summaries. Users by Screen resolution shows the top resolutions; it does not show every resolution, and it does not show the engagement rate beside them. The detail table is where the full list and the rates live.
DEAD END — EXPECTING SCREEN RESOLUTION TO BE THE BROWSER WINDOW. Screen resolution is calculated from the visitor's window.screen value — the device screen, not the browser window. A visitor with a 1920x1080 screen and a half-width browser window still counts as 1920x1080. Do not read it as the viewport your page was drawn in.
DEAD END — ASSUMING A SMALL ROW IS A SMALL AUDIENCE. A browser row of 96 users is 4.8% of the worked example — small, but it may hold the only visitors on a device your checkout breaks on. Read the engagement rate on the small rows before you dismiss them.
End state
The Tech details report is the technology inventory. The worked example below recomputes the share of users, the engagement rate and the key event rate for four browsers, so the top row can be read as a share before anyone designs for it.
Worked example — stated inputs, recomputed results. The browser rows below are stated inputs for the example. Every share and rate in the table was recomputed from them.
| Browser | Active users | Share of users | New users | Engaged sessions | Engagement rate | Key events | Key event rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome | 1,240 | 62.2% | 486 | 1,105 | 89.1% | 96 | 7.7% |
| Safari | 486 | 24.4% | 172 | 390 | 80.2% | 31 | 6.4% |
| Edge | 172 | 8.6% | 61 | 138 | 80.2% | 12 | 7.0% |
| Firefox | 96 | 4.8% | 34 | 71 | 74.0% | 5 | 5.2% |
| Total | 1,994 | 100.0% | 753 | 1,704 | 85.5% | 144 | 7.2% |
Share of users is each row's users divided by 1,994 total users: Chrome 62.2%, Safari 24.4%, Edge 8.6%, Firefox 4.8% — the four shares sum to 100.0%. Engagement rate is 1,704 ÷ 1,994 = 85.5%.
Sources
- Analytics Help — Tech details report — the report path, its dimensions and metrics, and that screen resolution is calculated from the visitor's
window.screenvalue - Analytics Help — [GA4] Tech overview report — the summary cards on the Tech overview — Users by Platform, Users by Browser, Users by Device category, Users by Screen resolution — and that the overview sits in the Life cycle collection
Checked 11 November 2026. The click paths above are the ones in Google's help and developer pages, opened in full on 11 November 2026. No step in this guide was run inside a live Analytics property, because that needs a Google sign-in and this site does not sign in as anyone. The worked-example figures on this page were recomputed in Python with decimal arithmetic, and the downloadable JSON file carries the same recomputed figures. Google moves menu items without warning; if a path on this page no longer matches, the linked help page is the current map.