User Agent Changes

A Former User

@Aronand Cause I want Vivaldi to be itself… Well, hard to explain. Give me a few minutes/hours and I'll be OK again (w/ User Agent Switcher for Chrome always active w/ the old Vivaldi's UA )

Ruarí

@cqoicebordel: That is the plan

Ruarí

@potmeklecbohdan: It is itself. The UA was already just a string of different browser names at this point anyway, “Mozilla, AppleWebKit, KHTML, Gecko, Chrome, Safari…”

The UA does not define the browser. Most users never see it. It is only displayed to the websites you connect to

A Former User

@ruario I know, but it's like… ehm, maybe reverse the following… like being on Windows, using terminal & i3 and managing SW from Octopi (&c).

greenenemy

Good decision, problems with websites made me reluctant to recommend Vivaldi to less tech savvy people.

heinivanbergen

Nice, another extension I can remove

HellbillyDeluxe

That sounds like a reasonable change or better yet - workaround. And to be honest, for the exact same reason, I always change the user-agent of my web browsers to a generic Chromium one, so that I don't run into any problems. But seeing this change being being baked directly into Vivaldi is a good thing. Kudos to you!

madiso

This is also great for reducing fingerprinting!

Pathduck

I'm sure this is a good move to avoid users running into all kinds of issues with sites not working. It's definitely something causing a lot of grief (right after various extension issues).

It's funny (and sad) though that after so many years of the web, sites still do this. Developers repeat the same mistakes over and over. Browser-sniffing was one of the most common causes of trouble back in the Opera days - over 15 years ago!

Personally I'm proud to use a Vivaldi, and would rather display a proud "Vivaldi Snapshot Baby!" UA string. Any site that breaks with it is not worth it to use anyway

iAN CooG

@Pathduck Also this move would avoid the usual dumb sites saying that Vivaldi 2.10 is older than 2.9

Blackbird

Heh... maybe it's time for a "Bork Vivaldi" version. Unfortunately, that would probably do more harm than good...

rseiler

Elimination I had thought of (and I'd been running that way recently to avoid problems), but reversal I hadn't. It's brilliant, as long as the sites that do work don't change on you abruptly. Keeping the list very contained will guard against that.

BTW, I just looked: Brave doesn't use a custom string, and it seems to be doing very well. So I wouldn't worry about that part. Unsure if it IDs as itself to any of the sites you mention.

Chas4

I have had this in my signatures for over 10+ years:

Why Open the Web?

Despite the connecting purpose of the Web, it is not entirely open to all of its users.
When used correctly, HTML documents can be displayed across platforms and devices.
However, many devices are excluded access to Web content.

Another great explanation about what happens with browser UA strings https://web.archive.org/web/20120115224842/http://my.opera.com/core/blog/show.dml/3130540

I remember when gmail was sending Opera broken code when gmail got the Opera UA string (I even helped to test the browserjs fix for that).

Many web developers don't use feature detection.

Chas4

@blackbird: I remember when that Opera 'version' came out

Nekomajin

Will you publish market share data based on your own statistics, if Vivaldi ceases to exist for metrics providers?

Catweazle

Naturally it is always preferable that all web pages accept Vivaldi and therefore a different UA at the end perhaps it is not the best way to eliminate this discriminatory and idiotic browser sniffing.
Therefore, although I have a UA switcher, I usually avoid the sites where I need to use it as much as possible, because I see this behavior of this website as a direct insult to the user and therefore I do not deserve any trust.
It seems good to me that Vivaldi now intends to automatically hide in these pages, although I consider that perhaps it is not the best way to eliminate this practice from the network, although it shows that Vivaldi is next to the user offering this, ok, “sacrifice” in favor of the user.

madiso

By the way, why does Vivaldi expose the full build number (even to those specific sites)?
Why not display Vivaldi 2.10 instead of Vivaldi 2.10.1745.1?

LonM

@madiso For random sites on the web, that might be fine.

In the case of vivaldi.com, and vivaldi.net, knowing the full build number is useful as it allows the website to prompt you if you need to download a recent security patch for an out-of-date version. It may also influence behind-the-scenes things such as if you're trying to use sync on different versions.

madiso

@LonM That's not something any site should do, even manifacturer's - that's the client's job. The site can tell if it is old enough by the major number, minor number and critical patches must be presented strictly in the client's UI.

gabevilela

@potmeklecbohdan: Well, if you want to show the world you use Vivaldi, just set up any "UA switcher" extension to show "Vivaldi + version" at the end of the string.
I personally think that is fine. Brave doesn't have it own UA, and Opera spoof itself to chrome in many sites (like on facebook)