UserAgent string Manipulation worth it?

Questions
1

On Firefox you can type about:config an then add general.useragent.override, switch to string and enter whatever user agent you want.

By default your user agent will look something like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:134.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/134.

Which is okay, if you are on windows. But if your user agent looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:134.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/134.0

It in theory makes your browser look more unique among other browsers (fingerprinting).

So what do you think about setting up most popular UseAgent by hands?

For example:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/93.0.4577.82 Safari/537.36

Will it add any privacy?

2

Don’t do this. It’s a terrible idea and has been mentioned several times on this forum. Pls use the search function for a more in-depth explanation.

2 Likes
3

You’ll stick out like a sore thumb, horrible for privacy. The only time I can see using a custom user agent is on a proxy front end service so all inbound requests get proxied to the same user agent, but this is not an end user problem as it’s configured on the server.

Changing user agents is great for testing what happens when you change user agents, but this is more of a developer problem, and not an end user problem.