Vivaldi today released version 6.1 of their awesome browser. The big news this time are several improvements to the new Workspaces feature, and a setting that allows Vivaldi to masquerade as another browser for sites that stupidly block browsers based on Client Hints. And as always – a *lot* of small improvements and bug fixes in the change log.
The new Vivaldi on desktop masquerades as competitors to benefit its users and gives access to Bing Chat. Adds more functionality to Workspaces & Tabs.
Another change is Vivaldi is pretending to be Chrome for bad GPU drivers that apply performance tweaks based on executable name, something initially discovered by the Yandex browser developers.
It’s a sad state of things when browsers have to pretend to be something else just for basic functionality to work, and this happened a lot for the Opera browser as well back in the day. It’s history repeating itself once again, and this kind of abuse of web specification by web sites and driver developers will lead to a browser monoculture where the big browsers owned by mega-corporations who collect your personal data will be the only viable option for users who just want a good web browser experience.
Source: Vivaldi browser bypasses restrictions to access Bing Chat.