6/20/2023 0 Comments Waterfox browser![]() ![]() ![]() In the field at the bottom of the popup, you can see the actual useragent in use at the moment. You can select a new OS and browser from each of the dropdowns. To use it, simply click the icon, and a popup menu will appear, giving the choice of many different browsers and operating systems you can claim to be. In Waterfox, you can move it to the addon bar or the status bar (if you have Status-4-Evar) if you prefer. Once installed, you should see the little icon on the right of the URL bar. It will install and work from that site in Waterfox just as well as with Firefox. I use an extension known as User-Agent Switcher and Manager, available from the Firefox extension site. If a web site needs some actual feature in Chrome to work, it should detect that feature, or lack thereof, and act based on that, but if all if wants is a little string of text that says, “Yes, I’m a Windows PC running Chrome,” by all means, they can have that with a minimum of fuss. You can have the browser claim to be anything you want it to. Which browser you use is your choice, and if a site requires a given browser feature to work properly (generally considered bad practice, as a site should degrade gracefully to allow “lesser” browsers to work), it should detect the feature in question, not just sniff the useragent and decide you are not welcome.įortunately, a useragent string is easily spoofed. The details in the string will, of course, change, but they all look more or less like that. Banks are a particular offender in this way.Ī useragent string is just a little blurb of text that a browser will send along with HTTP/HTTPS requests that is meant to identify the client application in use (the user agent). If your browser is Chrome and you use Windows, you probably won’t have any issues, but if you use Firefox or Waterfox and/or Linux, you may at some point run into a site that harasses you or just plain blocks access. It’s been considered bad practice for decades, but some web sites still insist on a practice called useragent sniffing to decide which content you should receive, and even if you are allowed to use the site, in some cases.
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