“The price is hurting us,” Vivaldi developers say

Dec 19, 2019 13:14 GMT  ·  By

I said it before and I’m going to say it again: despite not having the same market share as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, Vivaldi is one of the best browsers out there, coming with a set of features that you really can’t find in a rival app.

But despite being such an advanced and complex piece of software, Vivaldi had one major problem: certain websites failed load correctly because of one very simple reason.

Vivaldi wasn’t considered a supported browser, so technically, these websites weren’t compatible with it. In other words, the content on the page was often scrambled or some services didn’t necessarily work correctly.

In practice, however, Vivaldi was fully capable of loading every page and application correctly. Because it’s based on Chromium, the same engine that powers Google Chrome, Vivaldi is compatible with 99.99% of the web, so you really shouldn’t have any issue loading the majority of websites.

There’s a good chance long-time Vivaldi users didn’t even notice this and it’s all because of the hard work the Vivaldi team put into dealing with these compatibility issues. The latest versions of Vivaldi come with workarounds for the most popular websites experiencing these compatibility problems, but this didn’t necessarily mean they were gone. Less high-profile pages still failed to load, and some services, including here HBO GO, didn’t work because Vivaldi wasn’t considered a supported browser.

So how come Vivaldi was flagged as an unsupported despite, technically, being supported?

It all comes down to the user agent that Vivaldi used to identify when loading pages. Despite being based on Chromium, Vivaldi used its very own user agent, and given most websites are optimized for Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, Vivaldi ended up being listed as unsupported.

Vivaldi compatibility issue with WhatsApp Web

But why did the Vivaldi team decide to use their own user agent if this caused so many problems? you may ask.

The development team says it was because of pride. In other words, they wanted web developers to know Vivaldi exists too and their pages weren’t loaded in Chrome, but in their browser.

With the release of version 2.10, this all changes because the Vivaldi tag in the user agent is removed. So from now on, websites will believe that the browser you use is Google Chrome and treat the browser as fully supported.

“The primary reason to show Vivaldi in the user agent is a level of pride. That pride, however, is hurting us, as our competitors and others are using this to block us from their services. That is why with today’s update, we’ve drawn a line in the sand so that you can browse more websites without a glitch,” Vivaldi explains.

This change translates to more compatible websites, which for the end user is nothing but good news. After all, using a custom user agent specific to Vivaldi didn’t bring any real benefit to the end user, especially because the browser is based on Chrome in the first place anyway.

If you want to see how websites treat Vivaldi when its original user agent is detected, you can just switch Google Chrome to the Vivaldi user agent and then load websites like WhatsApp Web and Netflix to get the compatibility warnings. To do this on Windows, Linux and Mac, close Google Chrome, and then in your terminal app type the following command for your operating system:


Windows


"%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.94 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/2.10.1745.21"

Linux


google-chrome --user-agent='Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.94 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/2.10.1745.21'

Mac


open -a Google\ Chrome.app --args --user-agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.94 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/2.10.1745.21'
Once you update to Vivaldi 2.10, the Chrome user agent is enabled and no compatibility issues should occur.

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