Identify Brave as another browser? Is it possible

I am running Brave 0.66.99 on Windows 10. I have noticed that lately when I go to my local newspaper’s website (Sacbee.com) using Brave the browser crashes. I suspect that they are running a script that identifies Brave and crashes the browser. I am thinking that if I can fool them into thinking it’s another browser then I can get around that problem. I recall that when I used to use the Opera browser it had a setting that allows a user to identify it as another browser. Does anyone know if Brave has a similar setting that I am missing? Thank you.

John

@john262,

What you’re talking about is generally referred to as a “User Agent string” – its essentially a bit of code that holds data about what type of browser it is you’re using. Right now, quite the opposite is true for Brave. As it stands, we currently masquerade as Chrome for this reason (among others).

As for your issue, it seems like the site will render correctly once cross-site trackers are allowed. This is not ideal as it shouldn’t be the case – however, when testing in Nightly and Developer builds of Brave, the site loads as intended. This is likely due to recent our refactored ad-blocking implementation which has not yet been pushed to Release build yet.

For now, allowing ads/trackers will at least allow you to view the site without issue:

  1. Visit sacbee.com
  2. Click the Shields panel in the address bar and change the 3rd-party trackers option to Disabled
  3. Allow the page to refresh.

Again, while not ideal, I hope it helps to know that this issue should be resolved as the new ad blocking implementation moves down the pipeline into release.

Thank you very much for your timely reply.

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