• BolexForSoup
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    810 months ago

    Aite maybe this is a dumb question, but what is “changing the user agent”?

    • @12510198@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1310 months ago

      When your browser connects to a website, it will tell the webserver what type of browser you are using in the HTTP headers. This can be used for serving a special web page for browsers with quirks, or it can be used to block certain browsers.

      It may look something like this:

      User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:123.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0
      

      But you can use an extension like this one to spoof your user agent and send out one that corresponds to a chromium browser.

    • sik0fewl
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      610 months ago

      Something you shouldn’t have to do in order to use the internet.

      There are browser plugins that let you change your user-agent request header to masquerade as another browser (e.g., Chrome).

    • Dr. Wesker
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      410 months ago

      User-Agent is a string of information that browsers use to identify to a site what browser, version, build, etc you are using.

      You can download FF extensions that allow you to spoof a different user-agent, making the site think you’re instead using Chrome, as an example.