User Agent Changes
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@Pesala Thank you for the tip on this! If the ability to choose a particular User Agent already exists, I don't know why the dev team just doesn't put this in the Settings panel somewhere. Then, we can easily manage this issue ourselves.
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I really hate the monopoly world we live in. You deserve better place as an amazing browser..
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@potmeklecbohdan I see your point as it makes sense for the majority of users. However there's still a little rugged defense in my mind that ceases to forget we have a a unique browser that stands up from the crowd.
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personally i think this is a pretty decent change. i think it's pretty childish of websites to block vivaldi just because it's a small browser and a competitor. you wouldn't see this happening to firefox!
i agree with some of the people in this thread saying that now is a probably good time to add user agent switching functionality to the settings, with defaults being the whitelisting that's being implemented. this allows new/inexperienced users to just use the browser without issue, but also gives power users a new setting to tweak without resorting to having another extension take up room on the top bar.
regarding browser stats, a friend of mine on the fediverse suggested adding things like Google analytics and other stat counters to the default whitelist as well? not sure if it's possible to, but if so it sounds very reasonable to do if it is.
thanks for the hard work, y'all!
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Recently found out Opera (web browser) fakes being Chrome to Facebook via browserjs
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So sad it is you to have to do such changes... But well, Unfair companies like MS pushes it too far. I'm so glad to see MS teams finally working with vivalding, throwing away the need to have an additional chromium eating memory... Thanks !
...I hope a way will be found to still be ranked apart from chromium in browser usage statistics, or that at least, website doing this kind of survey will show a disclaimer about the inacurracy of user-agent-based methods -
Google to phase out user-agent strings in Chrome
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-to-phase-out-user-agent-strings-in-chrome
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@rseiler From that same ZDnet link: "UA strings in Chrome will be replaced with a new mechanism called Client Hints. Client Hints is a mechanism through which websites can request information about a user, but without "the historical baggage and passive fingerprinting surface exposed by the venerable
User-Agent
header," as the official standard reads."This will bear watching from a user privacy standpoint, depending on just what gets revealed in the Client Hints mechanism and how much of that ends up in generic chromium browsers. Knowing Google's credentials in the data marketing arena, IMO the caution flags will be flying until proven otherwise.
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https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/
What is available via Client Hints:
Brand (for example: "cURL", "Edge", "The World’s Best Web Browser")
Major version (for example: "72", "3", or "28")
Full version (for example: "72.0.3245.12", "3.14159", or "297.70E04154A")
Platform brand and version (for example: "Windows NT 6.0", "iOS 15", or "AmazingOS 17G")
Platform architecture (for example: "ARM64", or "ia32")
Model (for example: "", or "Pixel 2 XL")
Mobileness (for example: ?0 or ?1)As far as I can tell, this is enhanced browser fingerprinting. It helps Google target and deliver better (read: higher priced) advertising.
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@btabke Yes. There isn't much of a need to include any of these. If we're getting rid of user agents, we might as well get rid of them entirely and not bother with implementing something new to replace it.
Hint Reason we don't need it Brand Has been abused in the past - ditch it Version Only necessary on the browser owner's website, so they can prompt you for a new version. outside of that it just adds fingerprinting info Platform The only place its needed is if you're downloading software, and changing that for a list of a few hyperlinks is not a major difficulty. Many sites do that anyway already. Model ‽ I can't think of any need for this other than tracking how rich you are. If you needed a particular feature on a new model, just use feature detection instead Mobileness Sites should always be responsive, regardless of if they are mobile or not. This will just lead to pages being rendered as "use our app instead". -
As these changes unfold in Chrome (and eventually filter down into other chromium browsers?), a lot will depend on how websites deal with Client Hint information. If they use it to restrict site access (as some now do with user agent strings), then we will be right back to where we presently are. It will also be interesting to see what, if any, options chromium browser developers (and extension makers) will have regarding the blanking or spoofing of Client Hint data to enhance user privacy. In any event, a lot of visiting system-fingerprint information can still be obtained by sites via JavaScripted queries regarding a visitor's system attributes... and users blocking JavaScript can be fatal to accessing those sites.
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The first problem is going to be the massive number of websites that break. There is so much agent sniffing going on now to deliver mobile vs desktop content that I think websites are going to break is a lot fresh ways. The ones in active dev should be ok, but millions of mom-n-pop shops are going to be hurting.
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The responses suggest that there's going to be a whole new can of worms from this. Wonderful.
Also, let's not overlook that the others may jump on board, too. Most notable would be Firefox, especially considering how hard they've been hitting the privacy/security angle in recent years:
"Apple (Safari), Microsoft (Edge), and Mozilla (Firefox) have also expressed support for Google's proposal to freeze and phase out the user-agent string, but have not announced detailed plans at the time of writing."
BTW, I wonder, did Vivaldi have a heads-up about Google's decision, or was dropping Vivaldi from the UA so recently just a coincidence? If they did know, it certainly would have been yet another good reason to drop it, since UAs period wouldn't be long for this world (at least as we know them today).
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As I ponder the proposed changes, it looks increasingly like having the present, detailed user 'agent string' in the initial user query packets will merely be replaced by a more extensive user data 'table' (ie Client Hints) made available soon thereafter in the connection. What a site does with the data will still be entirely up to the site and how it writes its site code... hence, no real improvement will necessarily result for the user-agent issues currently being faced by browsers and users.
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@Blackbird said in User Agent Changes:
If they use it to restrict site access (as some now do with user agent strings), then we will be right back to where we presently are.
Yes. Browsers are still going to have to lie and say they're Chrome.
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On the HTML5 Test Page Vivaldi identifies as Chrome 79 and scores 535 points. If I use developer tools to identify as Vivaldi the score is on 523. Am I using the right ID, and which result is accurate? Note that Vivaldi is not listed, and one has to type in a custom ID.
The lower score for Vivaldi is due to less support in the User Interaction section.
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@Pesala Yes, at the bottom of the HTML5 Test Page, they note: "The HTML5 test does not try to test all of the new features offered by HTML5, nor does it try to test the functionality of each feature it does detect." IOW, they're apparently profiling parts of Vivaldi as they believe it would behave from some database they have and reporting that result in their 'test' tables. A nice example of the User Agent String being used to shape a website response.
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To repeat what @escape75 said, What is the proper way now for extension developers to detect that they are running on Vivaldi in order to fix issues ?
For example, an extension from the Chrome store might override the new tab page, but since Chrome uses "chrome_url_overrides" it will use that, however Vivaldi doesn't support that so it needs to revert back to "chrome.tabs.onCreated" but in order to do that we need to know we're running on the Vivaldi browser ...
What is the correct procedure to detect the browser ?
Websites may not need to know which browser is being used, but extension developers do.
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this breaks websites that display additional information alongside the push subscription popup as Vivaldi aligns that popup differently than other browsers.
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@Holly That's bad design for information display overall. Those sites should just display the info about why they need a permission before asking it.
By the way, latest Vivaldi snapshots have a flag
vivaldi://flags/#freeze-user-agent
that makes the user agent even more private