Re: DuckDuckGo Browser Info?

In message <[email protected]> at Thu, 20 Jun 2024 15:53:13, 
Paul <[email protected]> writes
>On 6/20/2024 10:08 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>> On Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:54:22 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver"
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> In message <[email protected]> at Wed, 19 Jun
>>> 2024 18:06:44, [email protected] writes
>>> []
>>>> That's where I use mine, too.  I concurrently use Windows 7 because
>>>> quite a few sites block my XP.
>>>
>>> Does fiddling the user string (I think that's what it's called) no
>>> longer work? I know some sites now ignore that string but instead do
>>> some sort of test. )-:
>>
>> I have no idea what what you mean as to "user string".
>>
>> I'm one  of the ignorant who pretty much knows only how to turn on a
>> PC and hope it does it's thingy by itself.
>>
I thought as I was typing it, that I hadn't got it quite right - "agent" 
not "string".

It's basically a string of characters that the browser returns to any 
website that asks for it. By default, it tells the truth about what 
browser you're using (and usually what version of Windows - or whatever 
- you're using it under). However, it was found it was possible to 
"fake" a browser by setting a different browser string - so that, for 
example, you could fool a web page by setting a different browser 
string, so the web site thought you were running Internet Explorer when 
you were really running Netscape, or vice versa. Why would you want to? 
Well, some websites gave you different content - or wouldn't talk to you 
at all - if you weren't using the browser they preferred.

Website designers got wise to it eventually, and instead of just asking 
for the "user agent" string, they would do something - run a script, or 
similar - which they knew how various browsers would react to, so they 
could find what browser you were using that way.
>
>https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent/

Hmm; according to that website, I'm using

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, 
like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Which is something of a surprise to me, as I'm running Windows 7, 32 bit 
and Chrome 109.0.5414.120!
[]
>"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,"
>
>   Paul

I haven't set a fake user agent string on this computer - life's too 
short.
-- 
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

History is not the past. It is the method we have evolved of organising our
ignorance of the past. - Hilary Mantel, first Reith Lecture 2017