Comment by wongarsu

1 year ago

They are pretending to be an ancient Mozilla version from the time after Netscape but before Firefox, KHTML (which was forked to webkit), Firefox (Gecko engine), Chrome and Safari. The only piece of browser history it's missing is somehow pretending to be IE.

> The only piece of browser history it's missing is somehow pretending to be IE.

They're kinda covered because IE also sent Mozilla/5.0 (or 4.0, 2.0, [..]).

Amusingly, I also just realized that even the operating system is spoofed here! I'm on macOS 14, yet the user agent claims "Mac OS X" 10.15. It's a pretty funny situation, and clearly for the sole benefit of very old websites and libraries performing dubious checks.

  • I don't know if they still do it, but the Apple Silicon Macs also lied about their architecture and said they're Intel. Truth is not the guiding principle of the User-Agent (or all the JS navigator properties, or anything else easy to use to check this kind of thing).