this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Changing User-Agent to Google Chrome drastically improves YouTube load times (twitter.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

Here are some instructions in case you are inclined to give it a try. You know, for research purposes. You can fill the blank in with this:

 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

The first part of the Chrome user agent being "Mozilla" always amuses me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I read a historical explanation of user agents and its just about the most retarded, convoluted thing ever. Definitely amusing though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Care to share?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Think I found it!!

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Also here is a vaguely related but interesting article

https://book.cyberyozh.com/deanonymization-vpn-and-proxy-users-through-user-agent-and-browser-fingerprints/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.

This is gold. Thank you.

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