Vivaldi Pretends to Be Edge Browser to Bypass Bing Chat Restrictions

The developers of the Vivaldi browser have announced that their product now pretends to be Microsoft Edge on Android devices in order to bypass Microsoft’s restrictions on the use of the Bing chatbot.

Let me remind you that we also wrote that Malicious Chrome Extensions Injected Ads into Search Results, and also that Google Tag Manager Is Used to Implement Web Skimmers on E-Commerce Sites.

The fact is that after Microsoft introduced the AI-based Bing chatbot, the company limited its use, including in such a way 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. That is, in theory, a chatbot should work in all these browsers.

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.

So, 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)
sec-ch-ua: “Not.A/Brand”;v=”8″, “Chromium”;v=”114″, “Vivaldi”;v=”6.1″

Now, 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
sec-ch-ua: “Not.A/Brand”;v=”8″, “Chromium”;v=”114″, “Microsoft Edge”;v=”114″

Jon von Tetzchner

The new feature is reported to be available in Vivaldi 6.1 released on June 6, 2023 for mobile, tablets and Chromebooks.

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 its user agent and masquerade as Chrome so that users could access sites that would otherwise unfairly block them.

However, users noticed that Bing’s Built-In AI Chatbot Misinforms Users and Sometimes Goes Crazy.