Solved User Agent Spoofing

Plasma

It has been suggested here: instead of forging a different user-agent string, just go to the affected website and tell them to stop doing such a stupid thing.

For everybody (like me) who wants to use Microsoft Teams on Vivaldi but gets hit by the "Unsupported browser" dead-end, please go to https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16941811-relax-browser-support-check and leave a vote and a (friendly) lament (developers are more likely to take that seriously than the one subject who screamed "fix this you f*** idi***s" in all-caps in that thread).

becm

@zhangdl the transient by tab strategy is essentially what developer tools already do.
So this approach should at least only break pages in already known ways and only needs a fast-access UI.

To not cause problems, site-specific setting would have to be consistently applied for all resources (except inline frames).
This strategy would need upstream Chromium integration, to ever be maintainable.
May only become feasible after strict site isolation is working realiably.

HTDx64

If the site affected is a bank site, they will totally ignore any user feedback as all banks ever. I remember banks requiring IE browser and any user complaints about it were ignored. It took many years to change. Please do not tell me to change my bank, because every bank in my country works the same in user feedback terms. "It doesn't work on X browser? Well, use a supported browser, you silly user".

Do you think a company who hires so incompetent programmers to implement super stupid user agent check would acknowledge its mistake and pay attention to an user feedback? I don't think so. BTW, they hire morons who think if the password is hard or nearly impossible to remember for a user, it's hard to hack. They also don't know that entering only some randomly selected characters of the password is far easier for the script (like attacker script) than for a user. And also, the masked password can still be stolen. The morons also think that password cannot contain Unicode. Because no. It would be too hard to brute force

No, we can't tell them to fix the site.

BTW, if those morons felt extremely generous and actually react to the silly user feedback - they would just add another "if" to they user agent script. It would solve the problem but in the most stupid and wrong way.

Catweazle

Worse when UA sniffing is used intentionally discriminatory, to make life miserable for an uncomfortable competitor (Google?)

DannyRomano

There are extensions for this, but it would be nice as a native Vivaldi feature. That being said, if everyone uses it and leaves it set to 'chrome on windows' - the only UA some websites like to accept - it won't do miracles for Vivaldi's adoption statistics

Catweazle

@dannyromano said in User Agent Spoofing:

There are extensions for this, but it would be nice as a native Vivaldi feature. That being said, if everyone uses it and leaves it set to 'chrome on windows' - the only UA some websites like to accept - it won't do miracles for Vivaldi's adoption statistics

It would be better if the websites stop using this Browser sniffing discriminatory and idiot

Same
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rseiler

@DannyRomano said in User Agent Spoofing:

There are extensions for this, but it would be nice as a native Vivaldi feature. That being said, if everyone uses it and leaves it set to 'chrome on windows' - the only UA some websites like to accept - it won't do miracles for Vivaldi's adoption statistics

Is that what it's about - statistics? Really?

Back in Old Opera's day--which, btw, was a far, far, far worse compatibility situation than what we face with Vivaldi--I understood why the default was what it was. Opera was trying to boost market-share numbers to get more sites to notice and thereby compel them to make changes to be "compatible" (sometimes that meant a trivial change, but on more complicated sites, not so much).

That can't be Vivaldi's goal. They're still apparently trying to boost market-share, but to what end? Vivaldi should already know exactly how many people are downloading and/or using Vivaldi, so that can't be it. Puzzling.

Maybe if I understood that I'd understand why Vivaldi doesn't maintain a browser.js-style file for compatibility. It's as if they're standing on principal and saying, in effect, that if the sites themselves don't fix the error of their ways, then we won't, and any users who want to access these sites will just have to figure it out themselves. Not great.

Catweazle

@rseiler said in User Agent Spoofing:

@DannyRomano said in User Agent Spoofing:

There are extensions for this, but it would be nice as a native Vivaldi feature. That being said, if everyone uses it and leaves it set to 'chrome on windows' - the only UA some websites like to accept - it won't do miracles for Vivaldi's adoption statistics

Is that what it's about - statistics? Really?

Back in Old Opera's day--which, btw, was a far, far, far worse compatibility situation than what we face with Vivaldi--I understood why the default was what it was. Opera was trying to boost market-share numbers to get more sites to notice and thereby compel them to make changes to be "compatible" (sometimes that meant a trivial change, but on more complicated sites, not so much).

That can't be Vivaldi's goal. They're still apparently trying to boost market-share, but to what end? Vivaldi should already know exactly how many people are downloading and/or using Vivaldi, so that can't be it. Puzzling.

Maybe if I understood that I'd understand why Vivaldi doesn't maintain a browser.js-style file for compatibility. It's as if they're standing on principal and saying, in effect, that if the sites themselves don't fix the error of their ways, then we won't, and any users who want to access these sites will just have to figure it out themselves. Not great.

I think the statistics in a market with fifty navigators is important. Vivaldi naturally knows how many users he has, but this does not work if these statistics are ignored by the pages.
Using a UA switcher that disguises Vivaldi from Chrome or Mozilla can not be a solution in the long run, since it prevents independent statistics in the network from registering the true number of users who use Vivaldi, thus they will not add it to their white list of 'compatible' browsers. A vicious circle Therefore there is no other to denounce this absurd practice of discriminatory browser sniffing and pages that practice it.

LonM

@Catweazle I think that could work. If everyone just identified as the latest version of chrome (at time of release), then you would no longer have website compatibility issues.

You wouldn't be able to measure statistics for Vivaldi any more, but you also wouldn't be able to measure statistics for any other browser either, so it stops having any meaning.

But, you would still be able to how out of date the browsers are, which is arguably more important.

Catweazle

@LonM said in User Agent Spoofing:

@Catweazle I think that could work. If everyone just identified as the latest version of chrome (at time of release), then you would no longer have website compatibility issues.

You wouldn't be able to measure statistics for Vivaldi any more, but you also wouldn't be able to measure statistics for any other browser either, so it stops having any meaning.

But, you would still be able to how out of date the browsers are, which is arguably more important.

In a web page 2 things can happen, that works or does not work (IE and Html5), independent if the browser is updated or not.
The browser sniffing should only have the reason for statistical purposes.
If it is discriminatory I have no choice but to think of bad intentions, since I do not swallow it, this puts me on the browser 'outdated' when I enter with Vivaldi latest version, but it does not say anything when I try it with a Chromium or Mozilla outdated for 2 years.
I mean, it supports browsers that either follow the Google guidelines or want to eliminate uncomfortable competition.
The part of Vivaldi in the market of the navigators is still testimonial, but aside from this it is mentioned in the majority of the specialized websites in group of the great Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Safari, ahead of others quite more spread (Maxthon , Avant, Ur, etc).
The war of browsers can sometimes be dirty

pwalker

Unfortunately this is still relevant.
For example for the last couple of weeks I had to use an UA spoofer extension just to fu##ing open the web reader of whatsapp as apparently they fu##ed something up and the Vivaldi user agent wasn't "supported" anymore.
Honestly if something like this happened on FF or Chrome they'd fix it within minutes but I guess noone gave a fu## about Vivaldi.
Anyway it's really not a big deal to have at least an option in the settings where you could set your own UA.
I mean it would be even nice to have the whole functionality of the UA spoofer extension built in, with drop down and custom filters for different sites etc but I'd be quite happy to have at least any field somewhere to set my own UA.
Also I am a QA engineer and sometime just for that purpose I'd love to have built in UA switching functionality.

mackrccsd

I am running into this issue as well. Wish a Vivaldi dev would respond.

derDay

@mackrccsd
please see this help article for spoofing your user agent

Alarak

I'm voting for this feature.
There are some websites, like "whatsapp web" for example that refuse to work if you're not using Chrome,IE or Firefox, sometimes websites even refuse Opera.

I've installed that chrome extension "User-Agent Switcher and Manager", but it'd be good to have it as an on-board feature, especially because not all users are skilled enough to install and configure that extension on Vivaldi to make websites work.

Pesala

@Alarak There is another method, without installing any extension, though also far from easy for non-geeks.

You can fake the user agent by opening developers tools (F12); in the 3 vertical dots menu select Network conditions;
User agent, uncheck Select Automatically, and then select "Chrome - Windows."

code3

@Pesala The navigator.user agent must be spoofed as well.

xandork

@pesala said in User Agent Spoofing:

@Alarak There is another method, without installing any extension, though also far from easy for non-geeks.

You can fake the user agent by opening developers tools (F12); in the 3 vertical dots menu select Network conditions;
User agent, uncheck Select Automatically, and then select "Chrome - Windows."

I'm glad to know about this, but if any Vivaldi team members are reading this, it would be very nice to have an easier way of doing this. In fact, I would go so far as to venture that there should be an option visible somewhere on the browser's UI, or available in the Settings or right-click menu.

For some sites, spoofing user agents is an absolute necessity. And for users who are web developers themselves, it would be nice to have an easier way they can check their sites' compatibility.

Pesala

@xandork The topic is tagged as PIPELINE, which is one step closer than NICE TO HAVE, but it is not yet IN PROGRESS.

With 4,477 feature requests, and a small team, those needed by few users or difficult to implement may have to wait for a long time. Wherever you see that a feature is tagged as In Progress, it may get done this year rather than next.

thevampkid

I wanted to bump this and add it to the mobile app as well.
Saying to ask the site is in my opinion telling the user to pound sand.

for ex, Samsung will gladly ignore your request. Google will gladly ignore your request. Supporting more browsers that compete against yours is for them, bad business.

In my opinion this is an essential feature to a competitive market that will kill your browser in this way.

pafflick

We have added a solution for this in today's release of Vivaldi 6.0. You can now set a custom Sec-CH-UA header, which should allow "spoofing" your User Agent, and mask as a different browser. You'll find it in Settings > Network > User Agent Brand Masking.