How Chromium updates affect the reliability of antidetect multi-accounting browsers

NOVEMBER 30, 2022 • PRIVACY & ANONYMITY • EXPERT OPINION

Octo Browser developers update the browser kernel within the first couple of days after a new Chromium version is released. It is important for us to provide access to fresh kernel changes to our users at the same rate as billions of Chrome users get them. This way our clients are indistinguishable from regular web surfers, and this helps them stay anonymous and avoid account bans.

Open source code and ubiquity of Chromium-based browsers are the reasons why Octo Browser developers chose this kernel. It helps us provide high-quality and deep fingerprint spoofing, and Octo Browser users can easily disappear in the 3,5 billion-strong crowd of Google Chrome users.

Chromium is a free open-source browser with a flexible source code created by Google. The most popular browser in the world, Google Chrome, is built on the Chromium kernel, and so are other popular browsers: Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Sleipnir, Avast Secure Browser, Yandex.Browser.

It’s not easy to determine the exact Chromium-based browser of a user, since most traffic analytics services only check user-agent, which is identical for many Chromium-based browsers.

Originally user-agent was meant to give websites information about the browser, OS, and other info for better content rendering, but unfortunately it was abused by browser and search engine competition practices that broke the rendering or simply blocked content from their competitors on purpose. That’s why many smaller and niche browsers practice header spoofing. For example, Vivaldi has to pretend to be Chrome.

Websites practice browser fingerprinting to identify their users. This means using the information about a user’s OS, software, and connection to create a unique combination of parameters called a fingerprint. This allows websites to track the activity coming from a given device by controlling even the smallest changes in the browser fingerprint.

Octo Browser lets you stay anonymous and create multiple accounts by giving websites different fingerprints taken from real devices. The important parameter indicating the kernel version in User Agent and Client Hints headers and API is also spoofed to enhance privacy.

However, each new Chromium version always works slightly differently compared to the previous ones, and discrepancies can easily be found by a sufficiently sophisticated script, like CreepJS. Chromestatus.com shows what changes in the browser in each version, and websites can use these changes to check your browser version.

When you are working with a multi-accounting browser, it is quite possible that you’ll access profiles using different devices with different browser versions. This risks compromising your accounts, since alternating browser versions is highly uncharacteristic of regular website users.

Octo Browser periodically checks its installed version, and automatically applies critical kernel updates. This means that sharing profiles in a team cannot be detected even by the most meticulous identification algorithms.