[tor-talk] TBB User Agent - how decided?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 04:57:45PM -0000, blobby at openmailbox.org wrote:
> How did TBB project people decide on the user agent which is:
> 
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
> 
> Panopticlick shows 1 in 30 browsers use it. I assume it's the most generic at this moment?

Tor Browser aims to make all the Tor Browser users look the same. That
is, the goal is to blend in with the other Tor users.

The goal *isn't* to blend in with "everything else using the Internet",
since that's a much harder goal.

See also the discussions in
https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/11701/most-common-tor-browser-configuration-panopticlick

And see item 5 in the list under
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#fingerprinting-linkability

This question comes up every time there's a new Tor Browser release,
because somebody rushes to Panopticlick, finds that nobody else is using
the new Tor Browser version yet, and becomes concerned.

--Roger