Hum when I visit some websites like duckduckgo.com or qwant.com it triggers an in-website small popup to install their browser extension. The catch is they correctly identify I’m using Brave.
As it’s not mentioned in my UserAgent, how do they do that?
Can you share an image of the pop-up you’re referring to?
This is likely a cosmetic change on our end where we replace “Chrome” with “Brave”. It’s why you see Add to Brave when you install an extension from the Chrome web store:
Maybe. When you hover on a Chrome Extension Store tab, it replaces chrome.google.com with brave.google.com in the tooltip:
If you could provide the code that does this on DuckDuckGo and Qwant, that would be preferable. I tried searching Github for it but could not quite understand where to look.
Is this what you’re looking for? https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/script/lib/l10n/grd_string_replacements.py
This seems to apply only to the software UI and not the websites being browsed. Even so, it does not explain why on DuckDuckGo the Brave icon on their Add extension page is stored on their servers.
They’re very likely using the navigator.brave.isBrave promise that we expose in lieu of a distinct user agent string. This method can be used to identify the browser as Brave, and thus offer distinct extensions and more to the user as a result.
Are there any privacy implications of using it? It seems to be detecting it via javascript rather than UA from http header, I think it might be a good thing then from privacy point.
This has the drawback of requiring sites to add special detection methods for Brave, leading to greatly under-estimated - if not completely ignored - market share measurement.
Solution used by Vivaldi is more elegant: they expose their full User Agent selectively.
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