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My Apache logs are telling me that somebody with browser string "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.231 Safari/534.10" is repeatedly fetching my personal page about my CD collection in a loop, and I'm trying to work out if there's anything I've done in my Javascript that's accidentally causing said traffic-hungry loop to happen in their old browser (I cannot reproduce the problem in modern browsers). I still have an old Mac with 10.7 on it (which might be close enough to 10.6.8), so I'd like to try installing that Chrome 8.0.552.231 to see if I can reproduce the problem that way, with a view to adjusting my Javascript until it goes away. After all, I don't see the point in blocking that browser or IP if it's my bad coding that somehow caused the loop.

I saw the question how to install a previous version of Chrome and tried typing 8.0.552.231 into omahaproxy but it said "requested version information could not be found". According to Google's blog, I'm looking for April 2010 or May 2010, but none of the numbered releases on commondatastorage go back before 2011 (100081 is Chrome 15, which I tried and it does not exhibit the looping problem). So how can I go as far back as Chrome 8 from 2010?

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  • Browser strings often lie. There's a few sites that have old versions of browsers - oldversion.com comes to mind, but there may be others that might store older versions of browsers
    – Journeyman Geek
    Feb 15, 2020 at 9:22
  • Well yesterday an IP address owned by Vodafone Italy (a mobile carrier) wasted 10 megabytes downloading 51 copies of my CD page (and no other page) with that same browser string. They were in America, then Germany, now Italy via mobile, all with that old 10.6 Mac and Chrome 8 hammering that same page? This isn't making any sense. I have now instructed the server to redirect any requests for that page with that browser string to this question page so whoever's doing it might be able to explain? Jun 11, 2020 at 8:58

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Older versions of Chrome are still floating around.

For example, I found on Tech World version Google Chrome 8.0.552.237, which might be close enough.

However, it is quite common for users to change their User Agent string.

This might also not be a problem with your code, if the accesses are coming from a malfunctioning robot that is scanning the internet while using an old and meaningless User Agent string.

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  • Thanks for looking. Unfortunately, that "Chrome 8" turns out to be Chrome 47 (opening the dmg file and checking /Volumes/Google Chrome/Google Chrome.app/Contents/Versions gives 47.0.2526.80, which is also what it reports itself as at runtime), so it seems Tech World have their labelling confused. Feb 16, 2020 at 7:54
  • I've now tried making part of my Javascript conditional on navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Chrome 8.0")==-1 to see if that makes the problem go away (history shows the loops starting up for most of a day, then stopping for a few days, so I'll have to wait a few days to see if it worked). If it is a robot with a false browser string, it may or may not be trying to run some of the Javascript, and it may or may not provide the same browser string to Javascript, but it's worth a try. Feb 16, 2020 at 7:57
  • My indexOf trick didn't work, and now the "Chrome 8" requests are coming from Germany as well as America, and all for my CD list and not any of my other pages. I can't fathom why anyone would write a robot that does this, it's bizarre. Mar 15, 2020 at 9:40
  • It might be malware, so an intentional attack.
    – harrymc
    Mar 15, 2020 at 9:57
  • It's hard to see how repeatedly fetching a static 280K HTML page is a useful attack vector when there are multi-megabyte binary downloads available on the same server. But I have now reduced the size to 200K by removing some redundancy in the markup, just in case somebody's program crashes at 256K or something. I suppose somebody might have thought my page makes a good test case for their project, although they really should have used their own copy if that's what it is because how do they know I won't change it (like I just did).... Mar 15, 2020 at 10:42

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