Up until now, the new Bing chat experience powered by GPT-4 has been exclusively available through the Microsoft Edge browser, as the company tries to push more users to use its products. However, Vivaldi is joining the fray today as the first third-party browser to officially support Bing chat, and it's all thanks to some trickery to fool Bing.

As the Vivaldi teams points out, Microsoft is artificially limiting access to the Bing chat experience. There's nothing that makes Edge more capable of using Bing chat than other browsers, but the website identifies your browser through the user agent string, and it blocks functionality on browsers that aren't Edge.

Screenshot of Bing Chat in Vivaldi

To work around this, Vivaldi has simply changed its user agent string when you visit Bing, so that the browser is identified as Microsoft Edge. That way, all the functionality is available as it would be on Microsoft's browser. That means you can use Bing chat to ask questions and get answers with natural language, search the web, and more. This works on both the desktop and Android versions of Vivaldi.

Screenshot of Bing Chat in Vivaldi for Android

It's not exactly the same as using Edge since that browser also has a Bing sidebar that lets you compose a social media post or rewrite the text, but a lot of the features you'd want are available through the Bing website. Vivaldi is the first browser to do this, but it wouldn't be surprising to see others follow suit. It's an unfortunately common scenario, as many websites are designed to arbitrarily break or limit functionality on lesser-known browsers.

Aside from that, this update adds some improvements to Workspaces, such as the ability to drag and drop workspaces to reorganize them in the menu. Another improvement that affects Workspaces is the ability to copy links for all the tabs in a workspace at once. In fact, this also works if you simply select multiple tabs or tab stacks, making it much easier to share multiple pages in one go.

Screenshot of Vivaldi with an option to copy all links for tabs in a workspace

Vivaldi is also reminding users that an iOS version of the browser is coming soon. A preview program is currently underway, and you can sign up for it here. If you want to download the desktop version of Vivaldi, it's available here.