Re:Browser Fingerprinting: A Survey
by amelius on Monday May 06, 2019 @07:53AM
(#19838533)
I suspect it will always be possible to detect at least the brand of the browser, regardless of what the user-agent string says. It's just too damn hard to implement the entire web specification consistently, and malevolent actors can easily exploit any small deviations in the implementation. And of course things which are not in the web specification (such as timing) can be exploited.
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After you figured out the browser, it will also always be possible to find out the browser version, because newer versions implement features not present in older versions. Then you just need a hint to the OS (at least distuingishing Linux from Windows seems easy) and you have reconstructed the entire User Agent string.
> it will also always be possible to find out the browser version, because newer versions implement features not present in older versions
True, but most browsers have an auto-update scheme, so basically everybody is on the same version at a given time (by approximation).