3 ms·

Has anyone tried running a generic User-Agent on a standard modern browser? (By "generic", I mean one that does away with this whole compatibility dance.) I'm c

Has anyone tried running a generic User-Agent on a standard modern browser? (By "generic", I mean one that does away with this whole compatibility dance.) I'm curious how much would break or degrade.

userbinator 1y ago
Unfortunately, everything that does fingerprinting/"bot detection" will get triggered.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  All of the privacy stuff straight up breaks the internet these days. Try using a VPN and half the time CDNs straight up refuse to serve you the JS files so sites like supermarkets or flight booking websites load broken or show some generic forbidden error. Blanking out the user agent would have to be pushed by either Apple, Google, or Microsoft. And out of those I feel like only Apple would do it. iCloud private relay doesn’t end up breaking websites since companies care about not degrading the experience for Apple users and make sure the site still works.
arp242 1y ago
Opera Presto didn't use it, and had a User-Agent like: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux zvav; U; en) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16 Didn't seem to cause that much problems. It did keep the version at 9.80, presumably because >=10 must have caused problems somewhere.
- sunaookami 1y ago
  God I miss Presto... but Opera did have major compatibility issues even when it was still popular.
ryao 1y ago
I once tried having my web browser claim to be the Google spider. It worked well and I completely forgot about it until one website soft banned me a year or two later for impersonating the Google spider. I contacted them to complain. They lifted the ban and told me the ban reason, which made me remember the experiment I never terminated.
chjj 1y ago
I tried doing that in the early 2010s. Even back then it didn't work (github broke for example). If you did it today, you'd likely be blocked by a lot of major websites for "lying" about your user agent. Cloudflare turnstiles will stop working, you'll get captcha'd to death, and so on. Even tor-browser doesn't dare to modify the user agent string in any major way. It's almost impossible to lie about because trackers don't actually care about your user agent. They're identifying your device/OS through side channels (canvas, webgl, fonts, etc).
- npteljes 1y ago
  Wrt/ Tor browser, it's not that they don't dare to, it's that they don't want to. One of the goals of that browser is to not stick out too much, and changing the user agent would do just that, so they don't do it.
  - chjj 1y ago
    Then the ideal would be to normalize the user agent string to look identical on every platform. My point is: they can't do that. e.g. A linux machine identifying itself as windows would be spotted immediately. Instead, they have to reduce entropy by bucketing you according to your device/OS/arch.
    - npteljes 1y ago
      I don't think there is a point there. In case of the Tor browser, they use the user agent to blend in, so they are not a good candidate to do anything about how stupid the user agent is. It's the current heavyweights who could change it for the better: Google and Apple. If either introduced a major change in how they present the user agent, websites would be very quick to adapt (if they need to in the first place...), or else. Otherwise, no change will happen - and I think this will be the case, same as with the HTTP "Referer" (misspell of "referrer"). Fun fact, non-browsers actually have much nicer user strings. I run an internet radio, and there is a lot of clients like Linux UPnP/1.0 Sonos/85.0-64200 (ZPS1) Nullsoft Winamp3 version 3.0 (compatible) Echo/1.0(APNG) NSPlayer/8.0.0.3801 mpg123/1.20.1

Has anyone tried running a generic User-Agent on a standard modern browser? (By "generic", I mean one that does away with this whole compatibility dance.) I'm curious how much would break or degrade.

userbinator 1y ago

Unfortunately, everything that does fingerprinting/"bot detection" will get triggered.

Gigachad 1y ago
All of the privacy stuff straight up breaks the internet these days. Try using a VPN and half the time CDNs straight up refuse to serve you the JS files so sites like supermarkets or flight booking websites load broken or show some generic forbidden error. Blanking out the user agent would have to be pushed by either Apple, Google, or Microsoft. And out of those I feel like only Apple would do it. iCloud private relay doesn’t end up breaking websites since companies care about not degrading the experience for Apple users and make sure the site still works.

arp242 1y ago

Opera Presto didn't use it, and had a User-Agent like: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux zvav; U; en) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16 Didn't seem to cause that much problems. It did keep the version at 9.80, presumably because >=10 must have caused problems somewhere.

sunaookami 1y ago
God I miss Presto... but Opera did have major compatibility issues even when it was still popular.

ryao 1y ago

I once tried having my web browser claim to be the Google spider. It worked well and I completely forgot about it until one website soft banned me a year or two later for impersonating the Google spider. I contacted them to complain. They lifted the ban and told me the ban reason, which made me remember the experiment I never terminated.

chjj 1y ago

I tried doing that in the early 2010s. Even back then it didn't work (github broke for example). If you did it today, you'd likely be blocked by a lot of major websites for "lying" about your user agent. Cloudflare turnstiles will stop working, you'll get captcha'd to death, and so on. Even tor-browser doesn't dare to modify the user agent string in any major way. It's almost impossible to lie about because trackers don't actually care about your user agent. They're identifying your device/OS through side channels (canvas, webgl, fonts, etc).

npteljes 1y ago
Wrt/ Tor browser, it's not that they don't dare to, it's that they don't want to. One of the goals of that browser is to not stick out too much, and changing the user agent would do just that, so they don't do it.
- chjj 1y ago
  Then the ideal would be to normalize the user agent string to look identical on every platform. My point is: they can't do that. e.g. A linux machine identifying itself as windows would be spotted immediately. Instead, they have to reduce entropy by bucketing you according to your device/OS/arch.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    I don't think there is a point there. In case of the Tor browser, they use the user agent to blend in, so they are not a good candidate to do anything about how stupid the user agent is. It's the current heavyweights who could change it for the better: Google and Apple. If either introduced a major change in how they present the user agent, websites would be very quick to adapt (if they need to in the first place...), or else. Otherwise, no change will happen - and I think this will be the case, same as with the HTTP "Referer" (misspell of "referrer"). Fun fact, non-browsers actually have much nicer user strings. I run an internet radio, and there is a lot of clients like Linux UPnP/1.0 Sonos/85.0-64200 (ZPS1) Nullsoft Winamp3 version 3.0 (compatible) Echo/1.0(APNG) NSPlayer/8.0.0.3801 mpg123/1.20.1