User Agent Changes

ThomasMcA

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.

Holly

this breaks websites that display additional information alongside the push subscription popup as Vivaldi aligns that popup differently than other browsers.

madiso

@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

madiso

@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.

druss

Glad you added it to startpage.com and glad you wrote this article! I'm a developer for startpage.com and I was pulling my hair out why "Vivaldi" was in navigator.userAgent on startapge.com but not on other websites. Now I know it's because you made an exception for us. Many thanks!

Pesala

@druss The domain startapge.com is for sale if you want to buy it

RealMat0s

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.