User Agents In Chrome and Web Automation

What’s the big deal?

We often get questions regarding the technical details of browsers, automation, etc. User agents play a huge part in the process of protecting privacy, allowing for randomization and much more. In this blog post we’ll explain the benefits of user agents, why our Instagram Account Creator uses them and much more!

What is a User Agent

On Wikipedia, a user agent is explained as “software (a software agent) that is acting on behalf of a user, such as a web browser that “retrieves, renders and facilitates end user interaction with Web content”.

In other words, when you use a browser, that browser is linked to a user agent. For example, a chrome user agent could look like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36, and that would represent your Chrome browser.

Usage of a User Agent in Instagram Account Creation

Increasing browser randomization. The bigger the pool of user agents, the more you will represent a large pool of Chrome/Firefox/Opera browsers.
Changing platform. Some of our user agents represent browsers such as Safari which represents the browser used on Mac/Apple operating systems.
Protecting privacy – if we show your real user agent, it may be detected after a while. Using our own user agent pool hides the string that represents your browser.

Final words

If you are looking into getting into automation, especially Chrome/Browser/Web, definitely take user agents into account before diving in. Also, if you are looking for a user agent generator, we made one that scrapes 500 latest user agents over here: https://gramcreator.com/user-agents/