Vivaldi Browser now spoofs Microsoft Edge on Android devices starting today to circumvent browser restrictions that Microsoft placed in Bing Chat.

Ever since Microsoft released their Bing Chat, they have restricted it so that users can only use it on Microsoft Edge browser.

This restriction is in place even when Microsoft Edge is built on Chromium, the same codebase as Google Chrome, Brave Browser, and Vivaldi, which means the service must work in all of these browsers.

As Bing’s ChatGPT4-powered chat service has proven to be very popular, Vivaldi announced today that he changes his browser’s user agent to impersonate Microsoft Edge when visiting Bing Chat.

When browsing the web, Vivaldi’s user agent string and Sec-CH-UA User Agent Client Index are:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)

sec-ch-ua: “No.A/Brand”;v=”8″, “Chrome”;v=”114″, “Vivaldi”;v=”6.1″

However, when visiting Bing Chat, the browser replaces it with Microsoft’s Edge information to spoof the browser:

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: “No.A/Brand”;v=”8″, “Chrome”;v=”114″, “Microsoft Edge”;v=”114″

With this change, Bing Chat assumes that the visitor is using Microsoft Edge and allows them to use the chat service without any issues.

This new feature is available in Vivaldi 6.1, which was released on June 6 for mobile and desktop.

How to spoof Edge in other browsers

If you don’t want to install a new browser, you can achieve the same functionality by installing browser extensions or changing configuration options in the browser.

In Google Chrome you can install their User Agent Selector Extension or change the user agent string for a particular section in the developer tools. However, it must remain open while you are using the site.

For Firefox, you can change your user agent string by going to about: setupand the search for general.user agent.overrideby selecting Chainthen clicking on the + button.

This will show a new string field where you can enter the Edge user agent string listed above.

However, installing a browser extension that allows you to easily change your user agent is much easier than fiddling with configuration options.