Avast A/V blocking Vivaldi
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For the last two days Avast antivirus (free version) has stopped my Vivaldi browser, latest version (32bit/Win 7) from accessing the internet. When I bypass Avast it works fine.. it's the online web shield specifically that's blocking me. I get no message from Avast, my connection attempts just time out. All of my other browsers, Brave, Chrome and Firefox are working normally.
I've tried reinstalling Vivaldi and putting it's main exec file and even it's whole primary app folder in Avast's exception (ignore) bin but that did not help.
Anyone else having this problem? Any suggestions?
thanks
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@harveyrabbit Avast! has done this any number of times. It seems the Avast! developers are incapable of creating a durable exception for Vivaldi as they do for IE, Edge, Firefox and Chrome. Periodically, their engine updates cause it to detect Vivaldi as "unknown" or untrusted." I don't use 3rd party security apps, at all, ever, for just this sort of reason. If you must use one, you might consider a different one. In the meantime, inform Avast! of the false positive and they will fix it, at least temporarily, as they have done in the past.
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@Ayespy Thanks. I've made a comment in their public user forum so we'll see if that helps.
I also submitted the vivaldi exec file to them as a false positive. Not sure if that will help or not.
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@harveyrabbit , I also don't use a third party AV, not needed in W10 with an excelent Defender and Sandbox system, but in the past in Win 7 I used the Panda Dome free, for years, it scan with a cloud system with real time definitions, apart with a good heuristic system. Never had problems with it. It include an VPN, but in the free versin limited to 150 Mb/day.
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@Catweazle Thanks. I'll have a look at that. I'd been using Bitdefender for a number of years but their new version uses an incredible am't of RAM.. nearly a full Gig so I switched to Sophos for a while and it was VERY unwieldy so I'm on Avast for the time being. Not married to it though.
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@harveyrabbit I use the paid Avast Premium, and have never encountered any problem using it with Vivaldi.
Of course I get the occasional website blocked by the Web Shield doing its job. Sometimes I report false positives for sites if I'm sure they're safe or files falsely blocked as malware.
What's interesting in this case is you can launch the browser, which means it's not the program itself which is blocked, but apparently all (?) outbound connections. Which would seem the free version is behaving very badly indeed.
At the very least it should notify a connection has been blocked. When it happens to me (blacklisted sites), I get a ERR_CONNECTION_RESET - not a timeout. Which might be a clue there's more to it than just the web shield blocking connections. But strange it only affects Vivaldi.
Have you enabled any other features in Avast Free?
The Avast forums are a mess and a den of bad advice. I suggest using their false positive form if possible:
https://www.avast.com/false-positive-file-form.php#pcThey also have Support, but only for the paid products, free are sent to the forums...
https://support.avast.com/en-ww/contact/enter#pc -
@Pathduck Yes, I sent them the false positive info incl the Vivaldi exe. I'm only using the basic Avast shields. I've disabled all of them one at a time and in any combo but it's only the web shield that affects the browser's function. And yes I do also get occasional warnings when it blocks a known bad site but this is nothing like that as you've alluded to. The browser is just dead in the water as though I've disconnected it from my LAN.
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@harveyrabbit The DNS_PROBE error means DNS (domain to IP) resolution failed. No idea why the Avast Web Shield would block that.
Have you changed the DNS-over-HTTPS setting in Vivaldi?
If you don't know what that is, you probably haven't... but still check the internal Chromium URL:
chrome://settings/security
And see if "Use Secure DNS" is allowed and if so what the current setting is.Do you have any other programs on your system which might affect network connections? Like VPN, Proxy, or other security programs?
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OK! Use Secure DNS was enabled so I disabled it and now the browser is working as it should. No idea if/how it got changed or it was always like that but in any case it seems fine now.
FWIW I've been using CloudFlare dns servers by default for over a year so not sure if that had any effect.. in fact I changed it temporarily to use my ISP's dns server yesterday but that had no effect on the problem.
Thanks!
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@harveyrabbit OK great
Was it set to "Your current service provider"?
If so it will try to guess what provider you want to use from your OS DNS settings. So if you have CloudFlare set there (1.1.1.1 etc) it will use CF.I changed it temporarily to use my ISP's dns server yesterday but that had no effect on the problem.
I think if you change your OS settings it would require at least a restart of the browser to pick up the changes, if set to "Use current provider". But it should then fall back to using regular DNS queries to your OS setting.
Check the same setting in your other browsers. It should be at about the same place. If other browser have Secure DNS set and working then it means Avast is blocking DoH connections to CloudFlare but only from Vivaldi.
I suspect a bug in Avast Free but it's not going to be easy getting good support there. Let us know how it goes
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Take courage and uninstall Avast free as I did.
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"Was it set to "Your current service provider"?"
Yes it was. I just experimented and turned it back on to that and also to use Cloudflare and the browser continues to work even after closing and opening it on both settings.
Very odd but it's working now so that's good
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@harveyrabbit A glitch in the Matrix then I guess
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@Pathduck That's what I think. My other browsers were all set to use my current ISP as well but they've all been running just fine. Strange that Vivaldi just started misbehaving a few days ago... I've been using it for two years at least.
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@harveyrabbit Generally I don't trust DoH to be reliable, and I don't like the browser taking over the job of DNS resolution, which should belong on the OS level.
And it's bound to cause strange issues that are difficult to troubleshoot, so I prefer plain old unencrypted DNS. It's worked fine for nearly 40 years now and no need to change for some new-fangled "privacy" faff.
So I set the router as the OS primary DNS, then CF as secondary. On the router I have CF for both. The browser is set to not use "secure DNS".
This has the added advantage of bypassing my country's DNS-blocking of certain
️ sites 
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@harveyrabbit said in Avast A/V blocking Vivaldi:
latest version (32bit/Win 7)
On a slightly unrelated note: Please note that in about 3 months the codebase that Vivaldi is based on (Chromium) will stop supporting Windows 7. At that time code that adapts to Win7 will start to be removed, and browsers based on it will stop working properly (or at all) when running on Win7.
Also note that Win7 has not been receiving security updates for several years (except for special cases).
