4 ms·

This is why I fake my user agent. I use Qutebrowser (https://www.qutebrowser.org/ https://www.qutebrowser.org/) but pretend to use the most common user agent on

• Pete_D 7y ago
  The User-Agent header was a mistake. Servers shouldn't care what my client is, only that it speaks well-formed HTTP.
  • PretzelFisch 7y ago
    The servers care because for many years clients had no guarantee of handling well-formed html and javascript.
    • 0x00000000 7y ago
      It’s still a bandaid solution that makes the problem even worse by increasing fragmentation. It’s the best way to make sure browsers never follow any standard and nothing ever gets fixed by shifting responsibility to hundreds of millions of websites individually rather than a few clients
      • paulryanrogers 7y ago
        This. It reminds me of the recycling campaigns shifting responsibility to the consumer with the transition from glass to plastic. As a web developer though I know the agent shortcut is tempting. Without it I imagine we'd have to wait for a quorum of popular browsers before dropping feature detection for any given capability.
• The-Compiler 7y ago
  From what I've heard, setting a Chrome UA doesn't help with the Google Mail sign-in.
  • vortico 7y ago
    Ouch, you're right. I can't log in anymore. EDIT: Chrome's user agent doesn't work, but Firefox's does. I suppose it works because if Google's sign-in form sees a Chrome user agent, it expects a certain different browser fingerprint, so it rejects it. But maybe it's more lenient on the fingerprint match if it sees a Firefox user agent. This one worked for me, from https://techblog.willshouse.com/2012/01/03/most-common-user-agents/ https://techblog.willshouse.com/2012/01/03/most-common-user-... Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0
    • The-Compiler 7y ago
      Note that setting that UA globally is a bad idea - it'll break stuff on various other websites. You might want to try setting it with a `https://accounts.google.com/*` https://accounts.google.com/*` URL pattern - or ideally, even only `https://accounts.google.com/signin` https://accounts.google.com/signin` or so, if that works. Please let me know what works and what doesn't, as I still can't reproduce this with my own Google account.
      • krageon 7y ago
        > setting that UA globally is a bad idea What exactly will it break?
        • The-Compiler 7y ago
          I often talk to people reporting a broken website in qutebrowser where it turns out to be due to a Firefox user agent. Some examples (there are lots more via IRC/Reddit/...): https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4302 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4302 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/3822 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/3822 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/1187 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/1187
        • Lammy 7y ago
          It can be the result of programming in the style of > if(browser == firefox) {new_feature_chrome_does_not_support()} else {old_feature()} instead of > if(new_feature in navigator) {new_feature()} else {old_feature()}