We will be doing maintenance work on Vivaldi Translate on the 11th of May starting at 03:00 (UTC) (see the time in your time zone).
Some downtime and service disruptions may be experienced.
Thanks in advance for your patience.
User Agent Changes
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@Pathduck Also this move would avoid the usual dumb sites saying that Vivaldi 2.10 is older than 2.9
http://iancoog.altervista.org/
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Windows10 64bits - 8core i9-9900K @ 3.60GHz - 16Gb RAM - nVidia GT1030 -
Heh... maybe it's time for a "Bork Vivaldi" version. Unfortunately, that would probably do more harm than good...
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Elimination I had thought of (and I'd been running that way recently to avoid problems), but reversal I hadn't. It's brilliant, as long as the sites that do work don't change on you abruptly. Keeping the list very contained will guard against that.
BTW, I just looked: Brave doesn't use a custom string, and it seems to be doing very well. So I wouldn't worry about that part. Unsure if it IDs as itself to any of the sites you mention.
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I have had this in my signatures for over 10+ years:
Why Open the Web?
Despite the connecting purpose of the Web, it is not entirely open to all of its users.
When used correctly, HTML documents can be displayed across platforms and devices.
However, many devices are excluded access to Web content.Another great explanation about what happens with browser UA strings https://web.archive.org/web/20120115224842/http://my.opera.com/core/blog/show.dml/3130540
I remember when gmail was sending Opera broken code when gmail got the Opera UA string (I even helped to test the browserjs fix for that).
Many web developers don't use feature detection.
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@blackbird: I remember when that Opera 'version' came out
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Will you publish market share data based on your own statistics, if Vivaldi ceases to exist for metrics providers?
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Naturally it is always preferable that all web pages accept Vivaldi and therefore a different UA at the end perhaps it is not the best way to eliminate this discriminatory and idiotic browser sniffing.
Therefore, although I have a UA switcher, I usually avoid the sites where I need to use it as much as possible, because I see this behavior of this website as a direct insult to the user and therefore I do not deserve any trust.
It seems good to me that Vivaldi now intends to automatically hide in these pages, although I consider that perhaps it is not the best way to eliminate this practice from the network, although it shows that Vivaldi is next to the user offering this, ok, “sacrifice” in favor of the user. -
By the way, why does Vivaldi expose the full build number (even to those specific sites)?
Why not display Vivaldi 2.10 instead of Vivaldi 2.10.1745.1? -
@madiso For random sites on the web, that might be fine.
In the case of vivaldi.com, and vivaldi.net, knowing the full build number is useful as it allows the website to prompt you if you need to download a recent security patch for an out-of-date version. It may also influence behind-the-scenes things such as if you're trying to use sync on different versions.
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@LonM That's not something any site should do, even manifacturer's - that's the client's job. The site can tell if it is old enough by the major number, minor number and critical patches must be presented strictly in the client's UI.
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@potmeklecbohdan: Well, if you want to show the world you use Vivaldi, just set up any "UA switcher" extension to show "Vivaldi + version" at the end of the string.
I personally think that is fine. Brave doesn't have it own UA, and Opera spoof itself to chrome in many sites (like on facebook) -
On a related note, whatever problems we might have with user agents (and they're certainly almost non-existent as of v79) are but a mere blip compared to what the Firefox team just did:
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I'm sad to hear that. I mean especially in relation to the not so free and open World Wide Web. It seems to me, MS used a similar announcement to restart Edge-development with Chromium.
However, is it possible to adjust that option to extend it for more websites, which will be get the correct UA? I own and support some websites and want get the correct string.
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@potmeklecbohdan: Sorry I don't follow
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@rseiler: I had a look and yes, they appear to be doing something similar. You can see this by loading duckduckgo and checking the headers on the first request. You find the word Brave in there right before the Chrome.
If I load another sight like elg.no their is no mention of Brave. Just a straight Chrome-like UA.
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@potmeklecbohdan: To pretend to be other browsers. This makes sense to the web devs that alter their sites based on UA (even if that is a bad move).
In an ideal world UA switches should not be needed by normal users. This change helps bring that closer to reality.
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@ian-coog: Indeed!
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I think that a UA switcher should only be useful in private browsing, if you want to have the browser and system hidden too.
In everything else it is absurd.
But the network is obviously owned by large companies and not at all public and free -
Their solution appears to less complete than ours however. I noticed that DDG sometimes displays Chrome instructions for setting the default browser, rather than Brave ones. This appears to be because they only set one of the two UA for their whitelisted sites. We on the other hand set both.
For those who did not know there are two ways of checking a browser UA. There is a header and a JS property
navigator.userAgent. You need to set both to really change your UA because websites can read one or the other of both to work out who you are. -
@madiso: That is all well and good until autoupdate breaks for some reason (which has happened to us in the past with macOS), then it is handy to have a fallback method.
In addition knowing the exact version number is handy for people reporting bugs to our bug tracker.
