Why does the user agent convey so much information?
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This is the EFF result, after using Chrome's new spoofing feature in vivaldi
USER AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Bits of identifying information: 14.23 One in x browsers have this value: 19275.8
It is better than before, but why does it still convey more identifying info than anything else?
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It says you run a 64-bit version of Windows 10 and a particular version of Chrome, the rest of it is compatibility information which any browser based on that version of Chromium would include. The only way to be less specific would be to drop some of the Chrome version or lie about it. Sorry, you can't improve it and still provide accurate information when really needed. Some websites (like Vivaldi's download page) need to know your OS while many need to know your browser (to know if they need to work around known bugs).
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I do not think that the UA is what says the most about the browser, apart from the generic information that one of these engines uses and that they are updated and the OS that you use. They are necessary information so that the web page, in case of a problem, can say that you have a browser that requires an update and for eventual downloads to offer you a compatible version for your OS.
The browsers specified in the UA can be any, substitutable instead of Chrome it can be any Chromium, for example, important is only the version of the engine .
There are other factors that can put privacy at risk than the UA (see Browserleaks) -
Some good articles on the history of the UA-string:
https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2010/01/12/history-of-the-user-agent-string/
https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
"And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded"
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Sorry guys, I figured it out, snapshot Vivaldi runs snapshot chromium so the UA is 90 when most users have 89. I will see if there is an extension to bump it down to 89.
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