People detect Lighthouse to cheat its performance score about lighthouse HOT 4 OPEN

I am generally not a fan of removing the ability to identify LH traffic. It is important to able to identify Lighthouse traffic in monitoring and firewall contexts.

As we know, cheating Lighthouse doesn't improve Core web vitals for visitors.

Yes, there are bad actors selling webperf plugins that intentionally mislead site owners.

My take: Abuse reports should be delivered to the platforms who host problematic plugins. Services like Wordpress and Shopify must maintain quality within their own marketplace.

Identification of traffic is important to software teams, agencies, consultants and all the folks who are focused on making positive webperf outcomes.

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I will take care of making our client hints not signal Lighthouse, and changing the PSI UA header.

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Next Lighthouse release will address the brand client hint, and next PSI release (~a day) will address its UA.

Checking for the Linux x86_64 value of navigator.platform.

I'm not convinced we should do this for purposes of evading detection. This is the same value that an actual Linux user would have. Are you seeing this used to detect Lighthouse? It'd be a pretty big false signal..

but, maybe worth doing to match the fake UA we set for mobile/desktop. @paulirish wdyt

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Checking for the Linux x86_64 value of navigator.platform.

I'm not convinced we should do this for purposes of evading detection. This is the same value that an actual Linux user would have. Are you seeing this used to detect Lighthouse? It'd be a pretty big false signal..

but, maybe worth doing to match the fake UA we set for mobile/desktop. @paulirish wdyt

I figured it may be more appropriate for DevTools to handle it as a part of the device emulation. I created a bug against Chromium: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/326791407

@benschwarz In principle I agree with your statement. This is yet another case of "this is why we can't have nice things". We spent months to uncover as many cases as possible and I believe there are still more that we didn't identify. In reality, most platforms don't have enough resources to address this at all.

At the same time, there are real non-technical people paying $ to "performance experts" taking advantage of this.

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