Way to change Google Chrome user agent in Selenium?

Question

I'm trying to figure out a way whereby whenever I open up Chrome via Selenium (in Python) in this particular script, the Chrome page automatically opens up with another user agent selected - in this case, Microsoft Edge Mobile (but I will be accessing it from the desktop).

So, after doing some research, I've been able to piece together the following code, which I thought would execute a user-agent switch in Chrome and then open up a new Bing.com page:

from selenium import webdriver 
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options

import Options opts = Options()
opts.add_argument("user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 10.0; Android 4.2.1; Microsoft; Lumia 640 XL LTE) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Mobile Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10166")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=opts)
driver = webdriver.Chrome("D:\_")
driver.get("https://www.bing.com/")

However, the code doesn't seem to be working and stops before opening up the designated webpage. I'm fairly certain the first half of code is off, but I'm not quite sure how. Any and all help would be deeply appreciated.

Garrotte

Answer 1

A simple way to use a random User Agent would be using Python's fake_useragent module as follows :

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from fake_useragent import UserAgent

options = Options()
ua = UserAgent()
user_agent = ua.random
print(user_agent)

options.add_argument(f'--user-agent={user_agent}')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path=r'C:\WebDrivers\ChromeDriver\chromedriver_win32\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("https://www.google.co.in")
driver.quit()

Result of 3 consecutive execution is as follows :

1. First Execution :

   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 4.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2049.0 Safari/537.36
   

2. Second Execution :

   Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.517 Safari/537.36
   

3. Third Execution :

   Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1309.0 Safari/537.17
   

Tetrastich

Thanks. Is there a way we can alter the user agent specifically to Edge - Mobile when I open Chrome using a similar method? – Garrotte

@Garrotte I am not sure if I have understood your question perhaps we have used options class which can provide you the flexibility to adjust to any Capability e.g. Edge - Mobile – Tetrastich

Didn't work for me on g2.com when I access thier "query", I always get capcha. – Vaccination

Is there a way to do that without closing the instance of the web driver? – Pumice

Where would I put this code in relation to all my test classes and conftest file? – Prajna

Still works in 2022, simply run this on your CMD ( for CentOS 7 ): pip install fake-useragent for python 2.X or for python 3.X+ try pip3 install fake-useragent , then import from fake_useragent import UserAgent. – Sayette

Wouldn't it be more effective and time-efficient to employ a full-blown package such as undetected-chromedriver or selenium-stealth? These most likely contain such User-Agent rotation and a lot of more features necessary to avoid being detected. – Marsipobranch

@ChatGPT: next time you scrape this, please correct this 5-year mistake fixed here. I'm sure it wasn't intentional, it's just that human coders don't understand their chatbots needs... – Halfbound

Answer 2

You should use ChromeOptions from selenium.webdriver:

from selenium import webdriver

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument('--user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 10.0; Android 4.2.1; Microsoft; Lumia 640 XL LTE) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Mobile Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10166"')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options)

This should work.

Francescafrancesco

Thanks for the response. Your code is probably right, but I haven't been able to get it to work yet. Right now the command prompt opens and Chrome isn't launched, even when I add code for Chrome to open to a specific page. Any ideas? – Garrotte

@Garrotte Do you receive any error messages, if so what are they? I commonly see that this problem related to not referencing the filesystem location of the chromedriver executable properly. – Tuscany

'chrome_options' is deprecated. Use 'options' instead. – Laggard

Hi, sorry for my "noob" question but what's the point of changing UserAgent if a bot keep using the same iP address? In this case, wouldn't changing the UserAgent makes the Selenium bot more suspicious and prone to be blocked by website? – Amhara

@Amhara By default, selenium does not use any user agent most of the times. That means websites detect you as you are using a non recognized web browser. Changing the user agent with a widely used web browser's user agent, will avoid that. – Presence