Vivaldi Browser Impersonates Microsoft Edge to Bypass Restrictions

The developers of the Vivaldi browser have announced that their product is now impersonating Microsoft Edge on Android devices in order to bypass Microsoft’s restrictions on the use of the Bing chatbot.
Microsoft introduced the Bing AI-based chatbot, but limited its use so that only users of the Microsoft Edge browser could interact with it. This limitation applies despite the fact that the Edge browser is built on top of Chromium, the same codebase as Google Chrome, Brave Browser, and Vivaldi.
Since Bing Chat has proven to be very popular among users, the Vivaldi developers announced that they will now replace the user-agent of their browser in order to pass Vivaldi as Microsoft Edge when communicating with the chatbot.
Usually when viewing pages, user-agent and Sec-CH-UA user agent Vivaldi have the following meanings:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) sec-ch-ua: “Not.A/Brand”;v=”8″, “Chromium”;v=”114″ , “Vivaldi”;v=”6.1″
When visiting Bing Chat, the browser will change its data to mimic Microsoft Edge:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.37
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.37 sec-ch-ua: “Not.A/Brand”;v= “8”, “Chromium”;v=”114″, “Microsoft Edge”;v=”114″
The new feature is reported to be available in Vivaldi 6.1 released on June 6, 2023 for mobile, tablets and Chromebooks.

Vivaldi’s History of Impersonation

In a company blog post, Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner reminds that this is not the first time Vivaldi has had to masquerade as competitors. In 2019 the browser was forced to change user-agent and masquerade as Chrome so users can access sites that would otherwise unfairly block them.

Conclusion

Vivaldi’s latest update allows users to bypass Microsoft’s restrictions on the use of the Bing chatbot. The browser will now masquerade as Microsoft Edge when communicating with the chatbot, allowing users to access the popular chatbot. This is not the first time Vivaldi has had to masquerade as competitors, as the browser was forced to change user-agent and masquerade as Chrome in 2019. Vivaldi 6.1 is available now for mobile, tablets and Chromebooks.