The Vivaldi web browser will now masquerade as Microsoft Edge so its users can access the Bing chatbot on desktop and Android. The firm already offers access to ChatGPT from its browser as well.
“Vivaldi began masquerading as Google Chrome for better site compatibility on desktop and Android in 2019,” Team Vivaldi writes, explaining that its browser is just as compatible with websites as Chrome but often ran into issues because of its User-Agent string. “Fast forward to 2023: The new Client Hints standard is intended to replace the legacy User-Agent. Vivaldi is now getting reports that websites block Vivaldi based on its Client Hints. History is repeating itself.”
To combat this, Vivaldi, which is based on the same Chromium rendering engine as Chrome, Edge, and most other browsers, continues to implement workarounds to what it calls “User-Agent discrimination.” And because there are people who would like to use Bing Chat but do not want to use Microsoft Edge—i.e. most of them—it had taken additional steps to make this possible.
“Vivaldi masquerades as Microsoft Edge when visiting Bing,” the company explains. “This means that you can access Bing Chat using Vivaldi on desktop and Android devices.” Concurrent to this, Vivaldi has released version 6.0 of its browser, which adds Workspaces for everyone (and not just business users, as with Edge) and the ability to copy and share links from tabs and tab stacks on desktop. Additionally, Vivaldi for iPhone will soon exit preview and become generally available.
Vivaldi offers the same out-of-the-box support for tracker blocking as does my preferred browser, Brave, but only if you configure it properly (which you should). The big difference between Vivaldi and Brave, though, is personalization: where Brave offers a fairly minimalist UI, Vivaldi offers a bewildering array of customization options that should appeal to any tinkerer. It’s certainly worth checking out.
You can learn more on the Vivaldi website.
