Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?

Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.

  • @[email protected]
    81•1 year ago

    It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff.

    One interesting experiment is to use a user agent changer to view a website, and watch how the website changes every time you load a new user agent.

    Google will remove search options if you’re using Firefox (mobile?), for example. But if you change your user agent to say you have Chrome, even if you are actually using Firefox, those options magically come back and work. It’s almost as if that’s anti-competitive behavior or something…

    It’s also how a lot of websites know whether or not to give you Windows executables or Mac executables, or Linux executables, etc.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        Brilliant example. I think some of the search tools like date range or image color also get removed with the Firefox user agent, but I don’t quite remember.

    • TunaCowboy
      10•1 year ago

      It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff

      While it’s true that many browsers choose to follow a convention that includes that info, User-Agent is just a string, so something like fuku is a legitimate UA

      https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#section-10.15

      curl -vA fuku example.com 2>&1 | grep -E '^[<>] (User|HTTP)'
    • @[email protected]
      5•1 year ago

      Before the paranoid think it’s invasive, it’s used mainly to tell the website what your browsers capabilities are, so that features work and render properly. And by “tell the website”, I mean they generally serve the same “code” to everyone, and your browser just uses different parts of it.

      It’s not as big of a deal now, but browsers used to render things very differently and had unique style features. Safari is still a big offender of this.

      The above Google search features probably means the developers being Google, probably just thoroughly tested the more niche features on Chrome. And probably at some point, other browsers like Safari shit the bed (common) because they used features that Safari didn’t support at the time, and decided to just disable them for Safari.

      • @[email protected]
        10•1 year ago

        It’s also used to create a digital fingerprint so you can be tracked without downloading a cookie.

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 year ago

        I think that they probably made it so their app looks nicer and want chrome to match, anyway then there’s apps that just block you if you’re not using chromium or derivatives, despite working on the browser you’re using. Ahem Ms-teams and another video conferencing software that I had to use.

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 year ago

        Yeah I didn’t think disabling features for Firefox users would make sense. The user would have to know you’re punishing them for it to be effective at incentivising them to switch to chrome.

        I personally don’t trust Google anyway and mainly just use duckduckgo.

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      Google also changes a bunch of features if you change the user agent to some really old or non existent browser versions.

      I don’t think they are making Firefox worse on purpose. I think it’s just something they don’t bother to fix.