Vivaldi identifying as Chrome
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The analysis tools I use for my Web sites show my test visits with Vivaldi as Chrome. Similarly, the "unrecognized browser or device" e-mail alert I get from Facebook when I log in with Vivaldi (because I use the "Cookie AutoDelete" add-on to kill Facebook cookies) says "Login alert for Chrome on Windows."
The user agent string for my browser is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.97 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.94.1008.32It looks like my analysis tools as well as Facebook aren't seeing the "Vivaldi/1.94.1008.32" at the end of the user agent string. I wonder, then, if the various companies that compile browser statistics are also identifying Vivaldi as Chrome, and thus undercounting Vivaldi users. Opera had a similar problem because many users were taking advantage of the option to change the user agent string for compatibility with sites that didn't recognize Opera.
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@trmarcus Websites handling user agents always ends up being a terrible experience. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
In an ideal world the user agent 'Vivaldi 1.13.xx.xx' would be enough, but because of some people misusing the user agent, you need all the extra guff and borked numbering in front of it.
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@gwen-dragon said in [Vivaldi identifying as Chrome]
Try to fix your software on your own.
For my AWStats i patched myself the Perl files (changed some regexes) on my servers to detect Vivaldi.You might be missing the point. Do you think corporations are going to fix their software to specifically recognize Vivaldi? More importantly, do you think the companies that compile browser usage statistics are going to fix their software to recognize Vivaldi?
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Unless everyone customizes their software to recognize Vivaldi as distinct from Chrome, every Vivaldi user will be involuntarily increasing Google's dominance in the browser market. But if the official browser statistics show Vivaldi usage as minimal or nonexistent because they haven't made the effort to modify their software, why would anyone else make the special effort to modify their software to see Vivaldi as something other than Chrome?
There must be a better solution. I'm only pointing this out because I believe it is making Vivaldi users invisible and thus impairing the viability of Vivaldi and its developer.
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@trmarcus said in Vivaldi identifying as Chrome:
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It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Unless everyone customizes their software to recognize Vivaldi as distinct from Chrome, every Vivaldi user will be involuntarily increasing Google's dominance in the browser market. But if the official browser statistics show Vivaldi usage as minimal or nonexistent because they haven't made the effort to modify their software, why would anyone else make the special effort to modify their software to see Vivaldi as something other than Chrome?There must be a better solution. I'm only pointing this out because I believe it is making Vivaldi users invisible and thus impairing the viability of Vivaldi and its developer.
Since there is no "King of the Internet" to decree which browsers that sites and market-share analytics must recognize, the chicken-and-egg situation will remain as it has for many years. Until a browser gains at least 1% market share, it goes largely unnoticed and off-screen with websites and analysts. Only above the 3%-7% share range does a tendency for universal recognition and compatibility seem to begin. This was the chronic issue faced by Olde Opera, which stalled around the 1%-3% share range and could never quite shed the problem of recognition/rejection by websites, though it did achieve analyst recognition. At this point in its life, the only way for Vivaldi to increase its recognition (and hence, market share), is to build a browser so useful, creative, and attractive that advertising, trade reviews, and user word-of-mouth to other users will create a sufficiently critical mass whence the sites and analysts will start to take notice.
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Since there is no "King of the Internet" to decree which browsers that sites and market-share analytics must recognize, the chicken-and-egg situation will remain as it has for many years. Until a browser gains at least 1% market share, it goes largely unnoticed and off-screen with websites and analysts. Only above the 3%-7% share range does a tendency for universal recognition and compatibility seem to begin.
It always happens when one contender reaches 50+ % market share. Webdevs then develop for one platform and ignore everything else, including web standards. The web was somewhat useful around the time when Google supported the Firefox browser, however they only did it to break Internet Explorer's lead, so their own browser Chrome could march through. Now the web is in the exact the same situation again, it once was, only Trident was replaced with Chromium.
This was the chronic issue faced by Olde Opera
Back in 2000 I started using Opera because it helped with web development due to its unforgiving renderer missing all the proprietary quirks. Once you got that "challenging" target rendering properly, cross-browser compatibility became easy from there.
