this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Some of you need to stop spoofing browsing agents. We need to show people that Firefox is used. This telemetry can help Firefox support and become a big competitor to Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.
Do you think the number of people spoofing user agents are going to even dent those numbers?
I say we just set our UAs to "Firefox", plain and simple. None of that "Chrome KHTML like Gecko" shit.
Typical Firefox UA:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0Chrome:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36See browsers started calling themselves "Mozilla" to say "Hey I can do what Firefox can!" (or back then still navigator, doesn't matter. So then sites started checking for "Gecko" (which is Mozilla's browser engine), and browsers (in this case Konqueror, I think) started adding "Hey, I'm like Gecko" to it. Then... it just goes on and on.
The only things not Mozilla in that Firefox UA are X11, Linux, and x86_64. It never stepped so low as to call itself "Mozilla (like Mosaic)".
Iirc there’s a “per site” spoofer that people could use instead, for those sites that require specific browsers. I don’t actually know what it’s called, and my cursory Google search didn’t bring up much of anything, but I do believe I’ve seen them before.
The FF extension is just called "User-Agent Switcher" I believe?
And yes, you can set it blacklist mode or whitelist mode (in other words, "use the extension on every domain but:" vs. "Only use the extension with these domains:").
I'll only switch away from FF if a site is completely broken. I'll try it before resorting to chromium
I only use fake user agent for snapchat, because they block firefox lol
Solution: fuck snapshit.
Why are people spoofing their browser agent?
Some sites that don't work on FF will work if the site thinks you're using a Chromium-based browser.
Huh. I can't remember the last time a site didn't work in firefox, but worked with a chromium-based browser.
I have NEVER seen a site that won't work with firefox. What is everyone even talking about?
I forget what specific site it was, but I recently experienced this with some website a doctor's office uses for online appointments. The site straight up said that it didn't work with Firefox and to open it in a different browser. I ended up having to use Edge because I uninstalled Chrome as soon as I had switched back to Firefox.
My local power company's site is broken in strange ways in Firefox. Bars for recent bill amounts are all the same length, usage page throws an error and won't open, a link in the dropdown for a home energy analyzer is completely missing.