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I run Linux and Vivaldi. Various webpages are able to tell that I run Linux, and I'm unsure if this is done from sniffing the User-agent header anymore.

Regardless of how it is done these days, I would like them to not be able to tell I run Linux, because this alone puts me in a microscopic minority which is not exactly good for privacy.

Vivaldi already lies on purpose about being Google Chrome, so why not also the operating system?

I have both searched myself in the Vivaldi settings and searched online without finding any way to do this, or any information on the matter. I suspect that it's some sort of "constant variable" that JavaScript is able to access. Can it be faked?

PS: Please don't make me trust another extension.

Destroy666
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Stan
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  • The thing that is sent to websites to tell them what tour browser and OS is called your "user agent" look in whatever extension store you have for a switcher or changer. Related (but for firefox) https://superuser.com/questions/466454/change-the-useragent-of-the-os-on-firefox and https://www.google.com/search?q=vivaldi%20user%20agent%20switcher – Mokubai Jul 19 '23 at 06:19
  • Well, are you *sure* that this is still the case? Vivaldi is Chromium under the hood, and I heard talks about entirely removing the User-agent HTTP header years ago... – Stan Jul 19 '23 at 18:52
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    All I see is some blog post about how the user agent is being "reduced" or simplified. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/deps-rems-100/ and https://developer.chrome.com/en/docs/privacy-sandbox/user-agent/ which talks about a user agent with reduced information that limits the amount of private information leaked. I see no reason why the user agent would actually be removed and don't see any replacement for it. – Mokubai Jul 19 '23 at 19:46
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    I see [Client Hints](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Client_hint) but it still seems that the user agent is a layer of that information. – Mokubai Jul 19 '23 at 19:48
  • @Stan did my answer help? – Destroy666 Aug 08 '23 at 00:12

1 Answers1

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With default feature available in all Chromium browsers including Vivaldi, you can change user agent temporarily:

  1. Open dev tools (F12).
  2. In menu (by default top bar starting with Select an element in the page to inspect it item), go to kebab menu icon (Kebab menu) -> More tools -> Network conditions.
  3. At the bottom of dev tools, a tab will appear with User agent options.
  4. Uncheck Use browser default. You can select e.g. Chrome on Windows or enter your own.

That will only affect the current tab until dev tools are closed.

A more permament solution, which you seem to be going for, is to use CLI, also available for all Chromium browsers, I believe:

  1. Close all Vivaldi windows.
  2. Make sure Vivaldi is in PATH or use full path to the executable below.
  3. Execute:
vivaldi --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/115.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

or anything alike.

Of course you can forget about using the command to launch or have a window already open, which will prevent it from working. In that case the more permament solution in form of an extension is needed, which you don't want.

Vivaldi already lies on purpose about being Google Chrome, so why not also the operating system?

Because there's not much reason for that. Why they pretend to be Chrome by default is explained e.g. here. In short, they claimed that some websites intentionally caused problems for users when the user agent header was Vivaldi. So they wanted to avoid these issues.

Problems with system/privacy are your way more personal use case. And changing user agent won't help you much with that. I'd recommend reading about e.g. browser fingerprinting and all the different methods that can be used, user agent is just a tiny part of that. System info itself can be found out through various means.

Destroy666
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