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Guide:User agent

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games

A user agent is how a web browser or storefront app tells an upstream site what it identifies as, namely the browser, browser engine, browser version, operating system, and occasionally architecture. The user agents can be temporarily modified user-side, which has at times made it possible to access otherwise unavailable games on for instance EA Desktop and Chrome Web Store.

Wikipedia page

How to change the user agent in Chromium PC browsers

Use a different user agent to make the browser think you're using a specific supported device.[1]
  1. Press F12 (Ctrl+Shift+I in Vivaldi and Opera) to open Dev Tools.
  2. In the top bar of that Dev Tools page, go to ⋮ → More tools → Network conditions. This will open up a new menu on the bottom.
  3. In the Network Conditions menu on the bottom, go to User Agent → Remove the tick from Select Automatically → Choose Custom... in the dropdown immediately below → In the textbox below the dropdown, replace any current text there with the intended user agent, for instance Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) QtWebEngine/5.8.0 Chrome/53.0.2785.148 Safari/537.36 EA Download Manager Origin/10.5.115.51547 to access EA Desktop games, or Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 13505.100.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.142 Safari/537.36 to access Chrome Web Store games.
  4. Keep the Dev Tools open (A pretty important part), and reload the page.
  5. The unavailable games would now be visible.
While there are Chrome extensions that simplify the user agent change process, such extensions have a poor security record.[2][3]

How to change the user agent in Firefox on PC (Quantum-era)

Firefox's method is a bit more permanent if you forget how to turn it off, making it more difficult to handle than on Chromium.
Use a different user agent to make the browser think you're using a specific supported device.[4]
  1. Open about:config
  2. Type general.useragent.override into the search box. In the row that shows up with that name, click String, then click the + button in the upper right.
  3. As the row's value, paste for instance Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) QtWebEngine/5.8.0 Chrome/53.0.2785.148 Safari/537.36 EA Download Manager Origin/10.5.115.51547 to access EA Desktop games, or Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 13505.100.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.142 Safari/537.36 to access Chrome Web Store games, then click ✓
  4. Open the storefront page.
  5. The unavailable games would now be visible.


References