Vivaldi 2.10 is out with compatibility improvements

[Karlston]

Vivaldi 2.10 is out with compatibility improvements

A new version of the Vivaldi web browser was released on December 19, 2019. Vivaldi 2.10 features compatibility improvements and usability enhancements.

 

Vivaldi 2.10 is already available as an in-browser update. Vivaldi users may select Menu > Help > Check for updates to run a manual update check or wait until the new version is pushed to the device automatically.

 

The new version of Vivaldi is also available on the official company website for all supported operating systems.

Vivaldi 2.10

 

Vivaldi Technologies noticed that some sites on the Internet would block access to the Vivaldi browser outright or modify functionality instead; this is caused by sites using user-agent sniffing to determine the browser that is connecting to the site.

 

Vivaldi is based on Chromium and it should work on all sites that Chrome and other Chromium browsers work on. While that is the case, some sites did block Vivaldi in the past nevertheless.

 

To improve compatibility, Vivaldi engineers decided to drop the Vivaldi part of the user agent string to prevent sites from discriminating against the browser.

 

Vivaldi uses the classic user agent only on a certain number of sites including several search engines and the company's own website.

 

The latest Windows version of Vivaldi returns the following user agent at the time of writing:

 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.94 Safari/537.36

 

Vivaldi created a video that explains the concept further:

 

Another new feature in Vivaldi 2.10 introduces support for matching the browser user interface to the color scheme used by the operating system. The feature needs to be enabled under Settings > Themes > Scheduled Themes > Use Operating System Theme so that any pre-installed or custom theme may be used in light or dark mode.

 

The last stable Vivaldi release of 2019 features a number of additional improvements. The browser's Quick Commands feature should perform better than before. Additionally, users may notice address bar and extensions improvements (toggle) in the new browser version.

 

As is the case with every Vivaldi release, the browser's core has been updated to a new Chromium version.

 

Closing Words

 

User agent sniffing is abused in this day and age, sometimes by large Internet companies that operate browsers of their own. The change should improve compatibility significantly and reduce the likelihood of Vivaldi users running into sites that don't load properly or block access outright.

 

Tip: find out how to speed up the Vivaldi web browser.

 

Source: Vivaldi 2.10 is out with compatibility improvements  (gHacks - Martin Brinkmann)

 

[News & Updates post... Vivaldi 2.10.1745.21 ]

[steven36]

Its been like this since IE 6 came out and  they use to block IE 4 .  Changing the user agent is nothing new ,waterfox  .palemoon has been doing it for a long time  but Vivaldi won't never be respected by banks and other sites or even be counted in the market share by changing there  user agent to Google Chrome . So it's  just a move out of desperation so they want lose what little users they have. If they dont have nothing to hide why do they close the source ? That's always  been a show stopper for me .  Most Chromium-based browser are made by people with  resentments of people they worked for like Brave and Vivald  are ran by devs that worked on other browsers. They no longer have jobs so  they make there own fork  and become competition  . But they never going compete with Google using  Google's  user agent strings.

 

They didn't  do nothing but add a few bells and whistles to the Blink engine.  Anything  you summit to  Chromium has to be approved  by  Google because at the end of the day the people that maintain the engine  work for Google.  That means if Microsoft ever got ahead of Google .The paid Devs would just quit  and fork off and Microsoft will be were they started out .They never going to give up control . It's like when  uBlock  had a split the real Dev split into uBlock Origin and uBlock is dead.  Classic Shell back when Windows 8.1 was being sold closed there source because of people copying them Google could do the same thing  to Chromium if they wish.

 

Quote

Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project developed by Google.

 

The other day Jonathon F set a bunch of his repos to private invite only , because of big companies using them without  donating . What you think would would happen if a Chromium Fork   started  being a threat to Google Chrome ? Google is  trying to do what what Apple does in the IOS ecosystem  for everything else  become the only browser user engine . But with all  the bugs in Chromium i rather change my  user agent strings than use it.