User Agent Changes
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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
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@Gwen-Dragon
- Version number won't change
- OS type and version won't be included (frozen to Windows)
- On mobile the device model is not included, Android is frozen to 9
- On Vivaldi-whitelisted sites this overrides the default behaviour (meaning those sites won't know about Vivaldi either)
In few versions, this will be the default in all Chromium browsers.
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Glad you added it to
startpage.com
and glad you wrote this article! I'm a developer forstartpage.com
and I was pulling my hair out why "Vivaldi" was in navigator.userAgent onstartapge.com
but not on other websites. Now I know it's because you made an exception for us. Many thanks! -
@druss The domain
startapge.com
is for sale if you want to buy it -
I was completely unaware of this behavior and it makes perfect sense. When using web apps like WhatsApp it recognizes that I'm in Chrome and this was annoying me. Now I understand why. It pains me that this sort of thing happens, and I'm glad they were able to fix it in reverse.
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