[chjj]

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]

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]

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]

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

[chjj]

> 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.

No. They don't use it to blend in. If they wanted to blend in they would be modifying every platform's user agent string to look like Windows x86_64 or something. They don't do that because there's no way they could possibly get away with it.

Instead, they're resigned to simply censoring the minor version number of the browser to reduce entropy.

> Fun fact, non-browsers actually have much nicer user strings. I run an internet radio, and there is a lot of clients like

And those tools will get blocked by various CDNs for not having a browser user agent string, not having a browser-like TLS handshake, etc. This is why projects like curl-impersonate and golang's utls had to be created.

[npteljes]

>They don't do that because there's no way they could possibly get away with it.

Yes indeed. They use it to blend in. What they want is to not stick out, so, they act like the rest of the browsers do.

Just like the tools you mention, curl-impersonate and others.

Bravery, daring, could only be done my market leaders here. Google and Safari. The rest of the guys just follow suit.