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Comment by torginus

6 months ago

Huh, I never knew my browser just volunteers my exact hardware specs to any website without so much as even notifying me about it.

It doesn’t really. The website thinks I’m on a iPhone 19 pro, although I’m actually on a iPhone SE 1st gen. So it’s off by roughly a decade.

  • Maybe that's one of Safari's numerous 'quirks' our frontend devs keep bitching about.

    Which in this case Im thankful that Apple isn't too keen on following standards like these.

  • Mine is radically off as well. Says I've got a GeForce 980 or equivalent with 4GB instead of a 5090. I'm guessing the detection only really works on Chromium based browsers.

This stuff is used a lot in browser fingerprinting for tracking purposes. More privacy-focused browsers usually feed randomized info.

The latest Librewolf prompted me to allow the site permission to make a WebGL context. That's what it used for hardware detection.

I thought that's how airlines do the whole trickery around having different pricing if you access the site from Windows or Mac...