A way to have a unique User Agent while still looking like Chrome

Hi Brave Community – This is a suggestion for the dev and business teams (is there a “business team” :slight_smile:)

Brave uses Chrome’s User Agent string as a way of getting sites to treat it as they would treat Chrome. I think there’s some concern about opposition to Brave’s model or something, and as well some sites just discriminate against non-Chrome browsers (see Webflow, and allegedly YouTube).

But by doing this, Brave doesn’t get any credit for browser share because servers and web stats firms will think it’s Chrome (maybe they can tell with some JS? I don’t know). Granted, Brave’s browser share is likely very low right now, but we can hope that Brave will gain traction over time. If you, the working team, care about showing up in browser share stats, here’s one way you could do it.

There current release UA string is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36

You could leave this fundamentally the same, but leverage the Chrome version number by using a unique minor version number after the main number, something like 71.0.7777.77. Same length, just a distinctive Brave-only string. Or 71.0.3272.83. Those last five digits spell Brave on a phone… You get the idea. There are countless ways to implement this, probably without collisions with Chrome releases. (Coordination with the Chrome team would ensure this – I don’t have any idea how benevolent they’d be, but you could make collisions unlikely even without their hope.)

Now, I suppose it is possible that hostile sites could key in on this. Not sure. Not at first they wouldn’t, and perhaps not ever. As it is now, sites don’t pay attention to the long minor version numbers in UA strings.

Challenge: Getting the web browser share stats outfits to recognize the subtly unique Brave UA. I’m happy to help with this. This could be easy or hard, but challenges are meant to be overcome.