Every browser has a description like "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; SM-T580) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36" called User Agent. You can set this value to something else, but be careful. If you set it to something that does not exist, then it makes it more likely to be identifiable. Or some things could potentially not work right if it expects a specific operating system, in example when downloading files. Usually not a big deal.
So ultimately you want to set this value to something that exist and something that is used by many people. There are addons which can make this process much easier or even change it automatically after some time period in example.
Chameleon at https://sereneblue.github.io/chameleon/ is such an addon for the browser. There are lot of other alternatives, I used a few of them in the past, but stopped using them because there was here and there trouble. If you do, I recommend to install this addon from the addon store of your browser and not from the website, but that is just my personal recommendation.
Thanks.
So what is measured is merely the browsers people are using? Then I can see why the metrics are more general ballparks than precise measurements, seeing that the user agent can be modified with ease.
The question is, if they only evaluate the User Agent? This is an organization specialized into statistics, they know it can be modified too. The ad industry tries to track you and find out everything about you despite these modifications. Don’t underestimate them!
Every browser has a description like
"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; SM-T580) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36"called User Agent. You can set this value to something else, but be careful. If you set it to something that does not exist, then it makes it more likely to be identifiable. Or some things could potentially not work right if it expects a specific operating system, in example when downloading files. Usually not a big deal.So ultimately you want to set this value to something that exist and something that is used by many people. There are addons which can make this process much easier or even change it automatically after some time period in example.
Chameleon at https://sereneblue.github.io/chameleon/ is such an addon for the browser. There are lot of other alternatives, I used a few of them in the past, but stopped using them because there was here and there trouble. If you do, I recommend to install this addon from the addon store of your browser and not from the website, but that is just my personal recommendation.
Thanks. So what is measured is merely the browsers people are using? Then I can see why the metrics are more general ballparks than precise measurements, seeing that the user agent can be modified with ease.
The question is, if they only evaluate the User Agent? This is an organization specialized into statistics, they know it can be modified too. The ad industry tries to track you and find out everything about you despite these modifications. Don’t underestimate them!
Fair enough. They still don’t know what >7% of people are using, though.
That 7% might not even be people. It could be bots doing HTTP requests and throwing garbage in the user-agent.