Question

I recently created an auto browser windows form app that browsers various places just for fun at this point. But I noticed when going to tracemyip.org that information related to my operation system and resolution are available to them. Is there any way to change only the appearance of my resolution and OS when browsing to these type of websites?

Answer 1

The browser name, version, and OS information are supplied by the browser itself, via the user-agent string, when the page is generated. You might find Microsoft’s MSDN page on the user-agent interesting. If you’re using the web browser control in C#, you can override the user-agent string if you need to.

If you use Firefox, you can override the user-agent in a similar way with the user-agent add-on. I’m not sure if or how you can change the user-agent in other browsers.

As for the screen resolution, a quick view of the page source reveals the following Javascript:

<script type="text/JavaScript">
     document.write(screen.width+'x'+screen.height);
</script>   

I suspect the browser is going to get the ‘screen’ variable information directly from the OS – I’m not sure how you’d override those values, nor am I certain you’d want to!