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by grayhatter 236 days ago
You're incorrect. I've never seen any browser, on it's own lie about it's user agent. (I can set a custom string and lie with it, but that's not the agent doing it)

Do you have a specific / concrete example in mind? Or are you mistaking a feature from something other than a mainstream browser?
1 comments
gkbrk 236 days ago
Firefox sends an incorrect version and operating system on its User-Agent when the privacy settings are turned on.

IIRC it defaults to a Windows user agent even when you use it on other operating systems.

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grayhatter 235 days ago
You're incorrect. I have Firefox configured with the most strict privacy settings, and it returns `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:142.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/142.0)` With the exception of it being Wayland instead of X11 it's entirely accurate. Would love to see whatever gaslit you of something so easy to test and validate.
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gkbrk 235 days ago
Nope, as it turns out this was actually a thing until 2025-01-24, where a commit removed this "pretend to be Windows even on Linux platforms" behavior.

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/eb2f90f870...

This OS spoofing behavior was added in 2019-01-09 with this commit:

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/264fe08c09...

So Firefox has spoofed the User-Agent as a Windows machine on Linux for around 6 years, and only stopped doing it early this year. Would love to see whatever gaslit you into forgetting this easy to test and validate behavior.

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grayhatter 235 days ago
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting

This was part of the resist fingerprinting feature. Which is an advanced user configuration. I can alter the user agent directly myself too.

Sigh

I regret getting tricked into arguing over such a pedantic specific, So I'd like to redirect the actual point, which is that it's not meaningful if a Firefox browser pretends to be a slightly different Firefox browser, but instead the problem is when something that's not a browser, claims to be and behave like one.

Still, +1 for finding the commit, I'd forgotten about this feature. I thought only the tor browser was this foolish.

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