Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What? It’s just a text string in the header. How in the world would that possibly make it more difficult to scrape?

All Chrome is doing is stop appending the current semver in the UA it sends.



The switch from UA to browser fingerprinting makes it harder to scrape without being stopped.

Yes, at any time the UA could be ignored and clients could be fingerprinted, but now the UA is being made next to useless, so fingerprinting will now become the default everywhere.


I mean I realize it probably isn't a problematic, just wondering, but on the other hand it shouldn't be so difficult to follow the reasoning based on the context I would think:

poster says - in order to be able to scrape effectively you should appear to be a real human, use different UAs etc.

So as this change happens different UAs become one less thing that you can easily change to seem less suspicious, as a non-frozen UA would then be a suspicious sign after some time.

So a sort of side effect.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: