4

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
  • 12,350
Stan
  • 135
  • 1
  • 9

1 Answers1

0

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
  • 12,350