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Using a Windows 7 x64 User Agent on Windows XP


Monroe

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A few weeks ago I updated my User Agents with a newer set of User Agent strings with a newer Firefox version ... I decided to use a UA string showing Windows 7 64x ... just to try it out ... I have been using Windows 7 32x for some time, never 64x.

This is what I am using with the K-Meleon browser ... I have three User Agents but have only been using this one, I will put all three below.

Firefox 46 (W7) - currently being used

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0

-----------------------------------------------------------

These are two extras if I need to switch for some reason.

Firefox 46 (XP)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0

and

Chrome 50.0 (W7)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.94 Safari/537.36

So far I have not had any problems (to my knowledge) using the Windows 7 x64 User Agent ... no problem with my banking site or other password sites. However, I'm now wondering if there are any drawbacks to be indicating I'm using Windows 7 x64 instead of Windows 7 x32.

If I download a program, I always pick the XP x32 version ... which of course is what I have for my OS. I started changing my UA to Windows 7 x32 when I started having more problems with some sites always saying ... just about everything is "out of date".

So a few weeks ago I decided to update my UA to Windows 7 with FF 46 but this time I went with x64 ... when I do updates at various places, could this create a problem of what might be actually downloaded?

As I said earlier ... so far I have not noticed any problems ... I would like to continue using XP as my user agent but Windows 7 seems to be more flawless with some sites.

...

Edited by monroe
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I've been using the Windows 7 x64 User Agent with Firefox for a long time now, upping the version numbers as appropriate. It was pretty much a necessity after our government's IT agency saw fit to persistently bombard all XP users with popups on all national and local government sites about how terribly dangerous it was to continue to use XP. (Best not to mention POSReady updates to contradict all the upgrade inevitability propaganda, huh? :rolleyes:) I chose the x64 UA over x86 because statistically it's the more common of the two, and to perhaps cause some confusion for any malicious scripts I might run into. Considering how often I run into those (never in my life so far), the latter is mostly an afterthought.

For normal browsing, this has caused no problems whatsoever. With software downloads, the issues I've seen have had to do with "well-meaning fools" - sites that helpfully offer you downloads for your OS based on your UA, but not so helpfully don't give you an easily accessible way to download a version for a different OS. Thankfully there aren't too many such sites. In any case, even if you happened to accidentally download an x64-specific installer, it would have to be a very poorly done installer indeed if it didn't flatly refuse to install on your x86 XP system.

Of all sites I have accounts at, I've only ever experienced problems with logging in to Paypal with the W7 x64 UA. I could log in OK, but for some reason never got redirected to my account page. I'm not sure if this is still an issue or not, as I've become accustomed to switching to the default UA before going there and thus haven't tried them with an overridden UA for a while. I have no idea why they'd feel the need to script their site to depend on something like that in the first place, as a text-based UI for sending money hardly seems to need any OS-specific (vs browser-specific) features.

Edited by mixit
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Thanks for the information on Windows 7 x64. I hadn't logged into PayPal for some time so I was just there and everything seemed OK with my current User Agent. I hate for XP not to get credit when I visit websites but I don't have problems with YouTube and other sites with the Windows 7 setup.

That may account for many more people still using XP but the OS not getting credit for daily use.

I guess I will continue to use my current UA setup ... I was somewhat concerned that something really meant for a Windows x64 machine might end up on my computer somewhere and mess some things up. I'm not well informed on Windows XP or 7 x64 machines.

Thanks again

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