Vivaldi browser impersonates Chrome to avoid being blocked

In a bid to avoid rejection from websites the web browser, Vivaldi is impersonating Google Chrome, with its new release of Vivaldi 20.10.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.94 Safari/537.36

Even as Vivaldi is a Chromium-based browser and should be supported at every site that supports Chrome, many sites will block the browser based on its user agent.

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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.94 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/2.10.1745.18

A user agent is a string that is sent to a site to let it know the name and the version of the browser being used. Normally when browsing the web, Vivaldi will send the site a user agent that contains its name as seen below, Bleeping Computer reported on Thursday.

There are some websites that detect the ‘Vivaldi’ string in the user agent and blocks it, saying that it is not supported. As a result, these sites recommend Google Chrome, which is odd as both browsers use the same HTML rendering engine, the report added.

(With input from agencies)