[SOLVED] browsers reporting wrong timezone?

freifunk_connewitz · Apprentice Joined: 08 Feb 2006 Posts: 231

hi,

I have started to check my browser fingerprints with panopticlick.eff.org and there is one weird information provided by all my browsers:
They report as TIME ZONE: "Arctic/Longyearbyen". This is numerically correct, since my real location shares its time zone with Longyearbyen. But why the hell are the browsers reporting this strange value and not what I have in /etc/timezone?

I'm asking this here because I think that it is not browser related (in happens no matter if I'm on Opera, Firefox, Chromium, Vivaldi or Falkon).

Any ideas?

mike155 · Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 2:12 pm Post subject:

Who reports the wrong time zone? Is it your browser? Or the Javascript code running on your browser? Or is it the web server you are connected to?

In Javascript, it's not possible to get the name of the user's time zone. But there is a function Date.getTimezoneOffset() which returns the user's time offset to GMT. A Javascript program can use that time offset to guess the name of the time zone.

freifunk_connewitz · Apprentice Joined: 08 Feb 2006 Posts: 231

Thank you for the clarification! Learned something again. Now I tested other fingerprint checking websites and it turns out that this Arctic phenomenon seems to go back to eff.org's panopticlick itself. Other servers reported other time zone names. So I can relax that at least this is nothing that makes me unique while browsing the web

Thanks!