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eafer / rdrview

Firefox Reader View as a command line tool
Apache License 2.0
836 stars 35 forks source link

Use a generic user-agent string #7

Closed dvn0 closed 3 years ago

dvn0 commented 3 years ago

For increased compatibility with various websites, as well as leaking less metadata about users, this commit sets the User-Agent string to one of the most common.

eafer commented 3 years ago

For increased compatibility with various websites, this commit sets the User-Agent string to one of the most common.

Thanks for the patch. Is the compatibility a theoretical concern, or have you run into pages that are failing for this reason? If so, can you share the links?

as well as leaking less metadata about users

I'm not sure about this. We don't fetch images, javascript or even css, so it's fairly obvious that we are using something like a tui browser, or maybe a scraping script. Rdrview would probably be the only such tool with the particular user agent you suggest.

I'm also concerned that I would need to keep the string updated as new versions of Chrome are released, or else we would stand out again. And Tor users might prefer a firefox ua, so that rdrview traffic doesn't look so different to the one from their browser bundle.

eafer commented 3 years ago

A different patch for this issue has just been merged. If you don't think it's sufficient, please let me know.

eafer commented 3 years ago

I think this is settled now, feel free to reopen if you have anything else to add.