56 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
56 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
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Episode: 4516
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Title: Browser User Agent
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4516/hpr4516.mp3
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Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:04 (official HPR transcript)
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4516, for 2025-11-24
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Today's show is entitled, "Browser User Agent"
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The host is Henrik Hemrin and the duration is 00:04:55
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The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
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The summary is "A web site did not work for me. The User Agent has an important role."
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Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Henry Kimlin and I'm your host today.
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A while ago I visited a website that is an archive for old historical documents.
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It is a database from where documents can be downloaded as PDF files.
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As a visitor, I can login to the archive as a guest.
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When I find a document of interest of the search, I can write click on the PDF icon and download the document.
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But I can not. No download starts when I click on the PDF icon.
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This is the first time I visit this archive so I do not know exactly how it works.
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It was time to investigate the root course. I use Firefox browser on a Linux machine.
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I tested several methods to see if any would solve the issue. I tried by changing settings for
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pop-ups. I changed Firefox security settings. I disabled VPN. I disabled Firefox extensions
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for blocking game trackers. I tested also the Chromium browser as well as the Epiphany browser.
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All those methods resulted in no difference. Nothing happened.
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I was in contact with a friend on Windows and also staff at the archive. Both telling me that
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from Windows it worked, including with Firefox. So now I knew the archive works and that it works on
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Firefox. So I thought, can this somehow be related to Linux?
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I asked in a Linux forum if someone on Linux could test to download.
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One person in the forum tested and solved the problem. I would not define it as a Linux problem,
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but the site designed that affected Linux uses. The trouble was something I had not thought of
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the user agent. When my browser contacted website, my browser can tell the site what kind of
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browser I use which operating system I use and more. This information can be used by the site to
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optimize the presentation of the content for me. For to me, unknown reason, maybe a mistake,
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maybe related to some old design compatibility issue, this site did not accept the information
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my user agent provided. The solution is to tell the website I'm something else.
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In the browser, there are developers tools. When opening the developer tools from the menu,
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typically a developer window with tools and analytics is opened at the bottom part of the web page.
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One tool is network. Within network, I can simulate how the site looks on different devices
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with different networks connections and I can also choose different user agents.
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The tools are similar in both Firefox and Chromium. The exact list of standard options,
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different and Chromium has more options pre-loaded. In this specific case, when I,
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in developers on Firefox, change user agent to Chrome desktop, which relates to Chrome on Windows
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as I understand and then reload the web page, I can now download the PDF file from the archive.
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When this website interprets me to be this other type of user, they can understand each other
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without any issue. I have reported back to the site owner and hopefully this specific site will not
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need this workaround for the browser user agent in the future. Thank you for listening,
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take care and goodbye.
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You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
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Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
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to find out how easy it is.
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Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
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rsync.net, and our mirror network.
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Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
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Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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