Most of us want to stay secure and private online, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult with increasingly sophisticated browser fingerprinting.

But what exactly is browser fingerprinting, and can anything be done to overcome it? Read on to find out!

Browser fingerprinting in a nutshell

Various websites and search engines use browser fingerprinting as protection against malicious bots. Every browser leaves its traces online, so this information allows websites (or search engines) to identify unique users, detect bot traffic, and even track their users’ online activity.

Browser fingerprinting is already making a significant impact on web scraping as well. It gradually becomes the primary tool to identify web scraping bots. One way to beat browser fingerprinting and browse the internet more privately is to use browser management tools such as AdsPower. Let’s take a look at how it works.

AdsPower browser management tool

AdsPower is a multi-login browser management tool suitable for Windows and Mac operating systems. The main AdsPower functions include:

• Multi-Account Management
• Dealing with the latest browser fingerprinting techniques by setting a specific browser fingerprint for each account
• Proxy servers integration for more efficient browsing

If you’re interested in more AdsPower benefits, check out their official website by clicking here.

Setting up AdsPower

The overall process is the same for both Oxylabs Residential and Datacenter Proxies. To understand how it’s performed in detail, you can simply follow these steps (or check out our video tutorial):

Step 1.  Download AdsPower 
You can get the tool from their official website.

Step 2. Create a profile

Open the app and click New Profile.

Step 3. Specify proxies.
To specify which proxies you want to use, fill out the form as follows:

Residential Proxies

Proxy type: HTTP

Proxy host: pr.oxylabs.io

Proxy port: 7777

For login credentials:

Proxy username: your-username

Proxy password: password

You can also use country-specific entries. For example, if you put us-pr.oxylabs.io under Proxy Host and 10000 under Proxy Port, you’ll receive a US exit node.

For a complete list of country-specific entry nodes or if you need a sticky session, please refer to our documentation.

You can check if the proxy works by clicking Check Proxy.

Dedicated Datacenter Proxies

Proxy type: HTTP

Proxy host: 1.2.3.4 (a specific IP address)

Proxy port: 60000

For login credentials:

Proxy username: your-username

Proxy password: password

Same as with the residential proxy example, you can check if the proxy works by clicking Check Proxy.

Shared Datacenter Proxies

If you’re using Shared Datacenter Proxies, enter the information as shown:

Proxy type: HTTP

Proxy host: dc.pr.oxylabs.io

Proxy port: 10000

For login credentials:

Proxy username: your-username

Proxy password: password

For a complete list of country-specific entry nodes, please refer to our documentation.

In all three cases, if everything is fine, click OK, which is situated just below the Advanced block.

Step 4. Launch the browser

You can do so by clicking Open under Tags.

Conclusion

As discussed before, the AdsPower tool doesn’t provide proxies by itself. For a smooth web scraping and browsing experience, you need to be sure that you’re using the most reliable proxies. Using AdsPower with our Residential or Datacenter Proxies helps you to avoid many browsing issues, e.g., dealing with browser fingerprinting.