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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

> We use the Chrome user-agent string

It shouldn't. It should use Brave since it's not Chrome.

That's a nice thought, but in reality lots of poorly coded sites out there do UA sniffing instead of feature detection. So lots of sites break (including many Google sites) if they think you don't have Chromium feature sets.

Honestly the user agent string should just be removed. The correct way to use it seems to be do not do anything with it so why does it still exist.

If you don't have an "officially recognized" UA string some websites will assume you're a scraper/crawler/bot/ and rightfully so.

That's just a heuristic of the times. Soon bots will be much smarter than that.

They already are.

If I was ever trying to scrape a website that blocked my user agent I would just set the user agent to chrome on windows. Every library I have used supports setting whatever UA you want.

Won't lots of sites also break if you don't have Chromium feature set but report you do?

A more descript UA here ("Brave but built on Chromium") seems magnitudes better than imitating a native Chrome UA to avoid bad code that specifically looks for Chrome/ium, no?

At one point they were using a different user agent so that Brave couldn't be blocked. Of course the same people that care about this sort of thing are the same people that want to track you without your consent.

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