My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil
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@ayespy I'm guessing there's a difference between the behavior with drive/apps for business users and drive/apps free versions. I say that because I'd never seen this message before yesterday, while elsewhere in this topic, @d0j0p referred to having seen it persistently forever. It would be nice if everything was 100% standards compliant I guess but that's a tall order so if google wanted to say that their apps were only available via chrome I wouldn't be too concerned; before I switched to Vivaldi I used Chrome for google apps and firefox for everything else (because Firefox wasn't 100% compatible, though it worked for most things). It IS a bit odd that they would do an open-source project (Chromium) and then make it difficult to use browsers based on that, though.
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I have found this article about Google
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/what_hath_google_wrought.html
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I guess this is related to the current issue I'm having now. For some reason, EVERY google app website (New Google Sites, Drive, etc.) are saying that Vivaldi is unsupported..
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It can also be a problem of Google, which currently exists, from some days do not load the notifications of other users in G +, or Vivaldi and also in any other browser.
I do not know if it will be related to the problem -
Gsuite is the best thing since sliced bread in my opinion and it works just perfectly with Vivaldi. However as I and others have said here, for a week or so now, drive etc. have inflicted on us an annoying popup that says that you're using an unsupported browser. Worse still, if you click through the "Learn more" link, you are advised that the browser you're using DOESN'T WORK with gsuite. I don't mind being told that it's unsupported (even though it's Chromium for crying out loud) but that latter message is flatly untrue. So every few times I see this I've taken to clicking "NO" (they ask whether you found the information helpful) and leaving a message copied in from a sticky note, to the effect that they are not being truthful and asking them to (i) stop it with the popup and (ii) correct their language. Maybe noone's listening (there's certainly no sign that they are) but it feels better than just dismissing it all...
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@aach1 If you ever get tired of copying and pasting your message use extensions like uBlock Origin or Stylus to hide the offending element. A company that employs such tactics don't deserve even your anger. In fact, that's what they're aiming for.
It could be a problem hide a warning of this type—if it were truthful. Not the case here. Google is just using it to harass users of "unapproved" browsers, and you did more than your share already letting them know Vivaldi works just fine and no, you don't want to see the warning for the 158th time.
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@nihal 159th. 8). But one thing - the message in the popup is actually true - that says that V is unsupported, which is their call and I can't argue with it. It's the message in the "learn more" dialog, which I have to click to get to, which is blatantly untrue. So I guess this is self-inflicted anger to an extent...
PS - this popup doesn't appear with version 1.9 of V (I know this because that's what I have to run on my Surface). Unfortunately on my other machine, I'm at 1.12.
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Jon, you know the Internet big boys are owned by the cabal and their side-kicks. Total control, and a zombified, brain-washed global population of not more than fifty million is their ultimate dream, with the rest systematically liquidated. Freedom of expression is under growing threat, and privacy is rapidly becoming a privilege enjoyed only by those who lived in the days before the Net existed. Big Internet giants are into some truly dark, weird stuff. Extremely creepy.and very evil.
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@jon: I use Vivaldi mail. I appreciate that you're giving us the service w/o charge or ads and w/o digging into our emails. Thanks.
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Things seem to have got worse with 1.12. Besides the annoying popup warning in gsuite apps that was never there with earlier versions, I just found out that New Google Sites won't even let you in (to create or edit). This is more than just a warning about not being supported (which I can live with), it's a complete lockout. I was using V just fine on new sites sites previously. Now it's not even an option, and for this one thing I am now back to firefox.
What changed with 1.12 that now makes gsuite so down on it?
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@aach1 Nothing. What Google is doing is not in response to Vivaldi.
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@ayespy So, out of technical interest, how does new google sites (and the rest of gsuite) know that I'm not using Chrome? I had understood from other discussions that Vivaldi reports itself as being Chrome. Is there some other way that Google finds out it's not?
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@aach1 Maybe, the sites and g-browser share a particular information to say "hey, I'm chrome!" other than the spoofed user agent.
But I hope not. As if the popup is not seen and the site works on other chromiums.... -
@aach1 It's called browser sniffing. Each browser must have a unique "User Agent" identifier which is detectable by websites you visit. The Vivaldi UA is:
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.63 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.94.993.1"The Chrome UA is:
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.62 Safari/537.36"You can see they are not the same. That is how Google knows you are not using Chrome.
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This is why I use a User Agent Switcher for use in GDrive and other Google sites.
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@ayespy ok thanks. I remembered what I was referring to - it was in Jon's original post: "We still have to hide our identity when visiting services such as Google Docs.". I'd thought that this was why I wasn't getting the annoying popup etc., so I assumed something must have been dropped when 1.12 came around. So he was referring to something other than the user agent?
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@catweazle thanks for that - wasn't aware of any of this, will give it a go.
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@aach1 No, the UA is what he was talking about. If we had employed "UA cloaking" for Google services, it may have stopped working.
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@ayespy right. That's why I'm asking about 1.12. On my laptop I'm running 1.12 and getting the annoying popups. On my Surface, I'm still on 1.9 and I am not getting the popups. Two possibilities: google nefariously changed something, but in a way that didn't affect 1.9 but does affect 1.12. Or something in 1.12 itself broke the cloaking for google sites. Anyway - now I know from @Catweazle that I can "do it myself", so I'll give that a go.
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@catweazle I tried a couple of the User Agent switcher extensions, including google's own one. Both failed because the version of Chrome (or Firefox) they gave me was considered "out of date" by google. I'll dig around but if there's a chrome user agent string for the current version somewhere, I'm interested.
