On Sat, 13 Sep 2025, Mouse wrote:
[Thorsten wrote:]
Please don't use a fake UA for *all* webbrowsing.
[yeti wrote:]
Why?
Fair question. I'd like to know too.
[rest snipped]
As Thorsten mentioned in his reply, it may cause problems with other
web pages. For example, at
https://duckduckgo.com/
the document I am served (using lynx) depends on my user agent string.
If my user agent string is accurate
Lynx/2.9.0dev.6 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/3.7.1
then I am automatically redirected to this page
https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/
which is provides a very simple, usable form for entering search terms.
But if I lie, and set this user agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
then I receive a document that is much less functional. It has no text
input field.
Furthermore, although it *does* include a link to a page that is
functional
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html
that link is broken, because its url is erroneously enclosed in double
quotes
"https://html.duckduckgo.com/html";
