According to their site, “Stats are based on aggregate data collected by Statcounter on a sample exceeding 10 billion pageviews per month collected from across the Statcounter network of more than 2 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every day, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 45 days from publication.”
That’s more or less what I thought. I wondered if you had some technical insight into what exactly they do. I can’t be the only one who has their browser set up to tell the world it’s running on Windows when it’s not.
How do you change your user agent header? Which extensions are required for that? Can you change it without extensions as well? I think using too many extensions would make my browser fingerprint more unique instead
This can be done without using extensions, but it’s just more convenient with this. For example, the Firefox browser has a settings menu available at: about:config. You need to create a string named general.useragent.override and assign it the desired value. For example, if you write there it is Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en), sites will think that you are using the Internet Explorer browser on Windows. You can also set this parameter only for a specific site. For example, create the line “general.useragent.override.google.com” and assign it the desired value.
Yeah, this is the way to do it without extensions, but it is way less convenient as you have to write the whole thing manually, while extensions make it really easy to switch between OSes, Browsers and all that.
Thanks! So for after creating a string general.useragent.override and after creating that string in about:config, I should put a value. What’s the value to be put in to make sites think that I am using Google Chrome on Windows?
How are the stats gathered?
According to their site, “Stats are based on aggregate data collected by Statcounter on a sample exceeding 10 billion pageviews per month collected from across the Statcounter network of more than 2 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every day, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 45 days from publication.”
That’s more or less what I thought. I wondered if you had some technical insight into what exactly they do. I can’t be the only one who has their browser set up to tell the world it’s running on Windows when it’s not.
I used to do that for quite a long time, but then decided to sacrifice a bit of fingerprinting resistance to help with the stats :)
There is a setting that makes websites detect that you are using Windows instead of Linux?
Well, start doing the opposite in school and library PCs.
You can change your
User-Agentheader. There are plenty of extensions that allow you to do that.How do you change your user agent header? Which extensions are required for that? Can you change it without extensions as well? I think using too many extensions would make my browser fingerprint more unique instead
This can be done without using extensions, but it’s just more convenient with this. For example, the Firefox browser has a settings menu available at: about:config. You need to create a string named general.useragent.override and assign it the desired value. For example, if you write there it is Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en), sites will think that you are using the Internet Explorer browser on Windows. You can also set this parameter only for a specific site. For example, create the line “general.useragent.override.google.com” and assign it the desired value.
Yeah, this is the way to do it without extensions, but it is way less convenient as you have to write the whole thing manually, while extensions make it really easy to switch between OSes, Browsers and all that.
Thanks! So for after creating a string general.useragent.override and after creating that string in about:config, I should put a value. What’s the value to be put in to make sites think that I am using Google Chrome on Windows?