logoalt Hacker News

bregmatoday at 10:25 AM4 repliesview on HN

There's still plenty of web sites that check the OS and if it's not Mac OS, Windows, or Andoid it's no service for you. Faking your UA is not always about privacy, it's about defeating stupidity.


Replies

kube-systemtoday at 3:24 PM

The only websites that really do this anymore are ones that are delivering native code for those platforms or those that require DRM that only work on those platforms.

dns_snektoday at 10:38 AM

You should only do this on websites that actually require it otherwise you're almost certainly going to cause more problems than you'll solve.

Messing with the UA header is going to get you flagged by every bot detection tool because when you change your header from "Firefox on Linux" to "Chrome on Windows" your fingerprints don't add up anymore and you look exactly like a poorly written bot. You're likely going to see more captchas, you might get blocked or rate limited more often, and get placed under increased scrutiny, orders held for verification, silently filtered or shadow banned, etc.

vidarhtoday at 1:12 PM

I'm sure there are some, but having used Linux for 32 years, it's been at least 20 years since I needed to do that.

jijijijijtoday at 11:10 AM

Browser yes, but OS? Rarely, I have issues with Firefox, but never had Chromium not working, too.

It any case, it would be silly to assume services measuring OS popularity would put up such limitations. And more likely than not, people are changing their UA as a work-around on a case-by-case basis than make it a default, since that's gonna cause trouble.

In the last decade, the only time, I actually had to touch the UA is when breaking ToS with curl :D