297495 - want ability to fool servers about what browser I am using

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Networking: Cache, enhancement)

Description

[John David Galt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

I would like a prefs (or user.js) setting to change the string the browser sends
when it identifies itself to a site as being Mozilla.  My purpose is to defeat
Google's new privacy-invading "prefetch" feature described at
http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200506/msg00190.html

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

To disable the google prefetch:

go to about:config, and change network.prefetch-next to false

(found in 30 seconds with a google search)

Comment 2

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

comment 0 sounds like you want to change your User-Agent header, which is
already possible (and some extensions provide UI for it, e.g.
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/useragentswitcher), but I can't figure
out how that would help you in any way for your stated aim?

Comment 3

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

oh. if google only sends that rel="prefetch" thing to mozilla browsers that'd
work (although I doubt that...)

since I believe comment 1 and comment 2 cover what you asked for, everything
seems to be already in place. resolving bug.