User Agent Changes
-
@potmeklecbohdan: Which browser will you switch to? Which modern/supported browser has a UA that does not include the UA of at least one other browser.
-
@lonm said:
That won't fix the main problem. It will make user agent a bit cleaner and remove the need for all the fluff.
But it won't stop people blocking browsers arbitrarily.
As I said, we are “keeping our eye on it”. This will likely evolve and we can also choose to what extent we would implement such a thing anyway.
-
@madiso: Because then snapshots cannot be differentiated. This matters because for bug reports one bug might be present in one snapshot and gone in the next. It also helps for any Vivaldi specific instructions. The UA changes between snapshots after all, so help can be tailed on a more fine grained level if you know the exact version.
That said, yes there is a case to be made for limiting it further for some of the sites in the list that get the full UA and perhaps we should consider that in the future.
For now I am not too worried the sites added are ours and four search engines. Three of which are privacy focused and all four have very good reputations. Personally I am not fearful of fingerprinting from them and in any case the situation for them is no different from the previous snapshots. They didn't gain more information (everyone else just got less).
But sure it is something to consider and I think we are open it the idea of limiting it further if there are concerns.
-
@ruario said in User Agent Changes:
Which browser will you switch to? Which modern/supported browser has a UA that does not include the UA of at least one other browser.
Well, I stopped the need to switch cause I got what I wanted. And it's still different if the UA includes UA of another browser or if it's exactly the same.
-
@andyt_at: You can always open tickets in Vivaldi's bug tracker. Developers requesting UAs with valid reasons can be added to the whitelist now.
Which shows the whole point here: Before it was Vivaldi who had to skim the net and blacklist every abuse. Now developers can request to be whitelisted.- Less fingerprinting -> more privacy
- Less work for Vivaldi -> more time for new features
- Less website issues -> more love
for Vivaldi
-
this was a good and inteligent move
-
@greenenemy: how said in an old Brazilian comedy program: "Your problems ended!"
-
@Christoph142 Thank you for your information. I'm not a developer, but would still need that feature. Is there a different way to do that?
-
@andyt_at What is your website and why do you need to know?
-
"Vivaldi will effectively disappear from third party rankings of browser popularity (we will be indistinguishable from Chrome)"
This is so sad!
"but that is a price we will happily pay to provide the best website compatibility for our users"
I'd rather be able to manually switch the user agent string and reload the page, like with Opera we used to do, AND also to set it as per-site preference, instead of looking just as Chrome!
-
@greenenemy: the option should given to all the other users to manually change UA, as needed, or wished. Why should NOT we have the choice, on that?!
We have options for almost anything, why shouldn't we have an option for this.
Make Chrome the default, let the users choose to switch it, as needed, or wished. -
Sounds to me like: "One step forward, two steps back." But if it helps users get to where they need to go...
Personally I'd rather be recognized as Vivaldi but that is just stubborn old me.
On a side-note, what does the W3C say about this topic? -
Luckily there are not many websites that practice this idiocy and therefore, really a change of the UA is only necessary in a few specific cases. It is currently an extension that I use less (about 3-4 times this year)
But of course it can be a problem, if the user must necessarily use one of these pages often. -
@pesala: I totally agree
-
@aronand: Vivaldi users don't undestand the user agent? C'mon...
-
@lonm: vivaldi users are NOT "the vast majority of browser users", but a tiny 0,02%, or less. Are we talking of Vivaldi settings, here, or of the settings of the browser of "the vast majority of users"?
-
@newscpq Obviously, we assume all Vivaldi users know all there is to know about User-Agent headers and have read RFC-2616 in its entirety :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_closed_eyes:
🎻Volunteer helper · Forum moderator · Sopranos tester 🛠️Troubleshooting 🐛Report a bug 📜Markdown help
🦆"With a rubber duck, one's never alone" -Douglas Adams🦆 -
@potmeklecbohdan said:
Now I'm thinking of switching to another browser
Me too: why on earth should I choose such a particular web browser, to hide its' name? I want to seen, I want to be known: if I'm a freak, I want to be recognized.
I don't want to hide in the mainstream dead flow, I am amongst the 0,02% web browser users in the world and this mean something: I'm not one of the 38% common browser users!
I want to be different from the masses!
Let ME choose my identity online!
-
Long Story Short: may Chrome be the default UA string, only if you let Vivaldi users the freedom to choose the identity they want to be known online. That is, do implement the manual UA string spoofing, as a per-site preference, like in Opera it used to be.
Give Vivaldi users the freedom to choose their identity online: we are not using a 0,02% market share browser, to pretend to be into the mainstream web browser users' average!
-
@ruario Hello, I am a manager from the IT department. We decided to use as main webbrowser next to Firefox also Vivaldi. There are two intranet websites, which shows the correct help information for the webbrowser. Both intranet websites use Wordpress as CMS. If there would be an option to set a list of such websites, I would extend it for intranet.blackseals.net and intranet.fob-ps.at.
Another good examples of one of our (my) websites is https://ip.andyt.eu. We use this for internal and temporary private purposes. You may be know there are many such websites, which shows public ip-address or country. All websites I know use (too) much Javascript, cookies, advertising and other unnecessary stuff. They are overloaded. In addition, important information is missing, such used protocol or cipher. Therefore we started for some time an own website for that.
There are many different usage for it: routing problems, connections errors or configuration problems. It is used by IT staff during Support or during development or getting up new services like gateways/firewalls, but also by employees as selfservice through internal help portals.
In many cases it won't make any difference whether Vivaldi or Google Chrome is present or recognized. It could definitely confuse and lead to uncertainties. Especially for employees who don't know about the background. At the moment I don't know a good example, but there are certainly cases where the right user agent is important. I suspect routing incidents when working with multiple web browsers and devices.
I hope I was able to provide more information about our considerations?
