this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
125 points (67.0% liked)

Firefox

17752 readers
1 users here now

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 8 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Aite maybe this is a dumb question, but what is “changing the user agent”?

[–] 12510198@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

When your browser connects to a website, it will tell the webserver what type of browser you are using in the HTTP headers. This can be used for serving a special web page for browsers with quirks, or it can be used to block certain browsers.

It may look something like this:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:123.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0

But you can use an extension like this one to spoof your user agent and send out one that corresponds to a chromium browser.

[–] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 6 points 10 months ago

Grazie for the link

[–] sik0fewl@kbin.social 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Something you shouldn’t have to do in order to use the internet.

There are browser plugins that let you change your user-agent request header to masquerade as another browser (e.g., Chrome).

[–] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

User-Agent is a string of information that browsers use to identify to a site what browser, version, build, etc you are using.

You can download FF extensions that allow you to spoof a different user-agent, making the site think you're instead using Chrome, as an example.