Restore a unique User-Agent

[da2x]

Brave should show some bravery of its own and own up to having its own User-Agent. I'm aware of and acknowledge this issue, but without identifying itself – brave will be counted in online statistics as just Chrome. Who knows? Maybe Brave will be more popular than Chrome one day, but website owners will not be prompted to sit up and take notice of Brave if they can't identify any traffic from the browser and its users.

The original issue report is also misleading. Of course the User-Agent would be unique in that test if no one else yet have run the test. With more users, it's uniqueness for tracking will be reduced over time.

[Sh1d0w]

In my opinion since Brave will block ads on the websites and most of website owners are not happy about it, by making unique user agent for Brave browser will just make easy for them to detect and block the website for users who use Brave. And so forcing them to switch to anogher browser if they want to browse the website.

[da2x]

Yeah, but Brave shouldn’t default to be a bad actor who hides their identify and tries avoiding owning up to what it is. Brave can already be detected with scripting (and so can adblocking), so this doesn’t change things all that much.

[Sh1d0w]

I think if this gets implemented in Brave, it has to be made configurable, you know in Chrome and FF you can override the default user agent with one of your choice.

[cndouglas]

CC: @diracdeltas

[diracdeltas]

We can add the option to set your own UA easily but we don't have plans to restore a unique UA as the default until we reach some nontrivial percentage of browser share.

[grahamperrin]

Respectfully, 👎 for sidestepping the lock. Please consider a cooling-off period and then aim to salvage https://redd.it/8hhss1; there's some understandable vitriol towards the direction that appears to be intended by your manager, but it's a conversation with having. Thanks.

[da2x]

As a publisher, I’d really like to see how many visitors use Brave. Any chance Brave could open an API for getting aggregate statistics on usage by domain instead of a User-Agent?

[bsclifton]

Closing in favor of brave/brave-browser#1052