The year is 2008 and I had been using Mozilla Firefox for two years after my painful but inevitable breakup with Internet Explorer. But, out of school and professional necessity, I had to make the swi
I would, and I do not believe these forks would be able to maintain momentum on their own in case Google made significant changes to Chromium that negatively affected user experience.
Vivaldi isn’t a simple fork of Chromium, it’s Chromium where the devs have removed a lot of Google crap, leaving only the essential at the choice of the user in the privacy settings to permit the compatibility with the Google services which they may use. Vivaldi isn’t even compatible with the Chrome Store, if you remove all APIs in the settings. The team of Vivaldi is small, but very good in what they do.
Until now, all intents of Google to track the users in the Chromiums, Idle.API, FLOC, etc, in Vivaldi don’t work.
Sure, but Vivaldi has not changed the core rendering engine. That’s the most complex part of the browser. If Google ever takes this in a direction that’s hostile to the users, I do not believe that keeping up with Google independently will be practical for Vivaldi.
There are only three engines out there, Gecko from Firefox, Blink in Chromium and WebKit in Safari. Google can’t block it, because this will cause of a head-on confrontation against several large companies, including Microsoft and therefore would be equivalent to commercial suicide for Google, Chromium is FOSS and even Google can change this.
Naturally it will continue to try to add different tracking APIs to Chromium, which are also regularly retired by companies that rely on the privacy of their browser, as Vivaldi has been doing for years.
Google also managed to damage many Chromium forks, by removing Google Sync, but this had no effect on Vivaldi either, by using its own server for this function, this one that many other chromiums now lack, including Brave.
Chromium along with its derivatives controls vast majority of the market, and Microsoft is already using Blink as their engine for Edge. Any user hostile features Google introduces will likely be seen as a positive by other corporations like Microsoft, so not really seeing them complaining.
As I said, changes like trackers and the store are superficial. The real meat is in the rendering engine, and if that gets significant changes to prevent stuff like ad blockers that are hard to work around then browsers like Vivaldi will have a problem because at that point they would have to start maintaining their own version of the engine.
Incidentally, this is why we have WebKit and Blink. Google and Apple disagreed on how the rendering engine should work and Google forked it. Now these have diverged significantly. Google was able to do this because they have effectively unlimited resources, I don’t see how a small company would be able to do the same.
The engine in Chromium IS Blink, used by all Chromium forks, not only by Edge. All current engines are directly or indirectly controlled by Google, also Gecko, all of these needs certain GoogleAPIs for no loosing the compatibility of most webpages. F.Exmple, without using the Google Crypto Token API, you can’t acces to any Google services, which a lot of people and companies use. This API is permantently active in all browsers, only in Vivaldi you can desactivate it in the settings when you don’t use any Google services.
As I say, Google can’t block the Chromium nor revoce the FOSS status, but he don’t need to do this, because he controlled the webpages wich include all type of tracking systems frm Google, not only the Google analytics and tracking APIs from Alphabet and NEST, (Googles advertising companies, also Mozilla do this, but not Vivaldi, this is the difference, not only because it’s a European cooperative, not a US company like others. You can only opt out of this tracking, requesting it directly in Alphabet, with your personal data.
No Google here, same for Brave, but which I don’t trust so much, because of strange crypto mining behavior and redirects to sponsor sites in the past.
Ok, Firefox is obviously an excellent browser, but not as private as it is always claimed, it protects you well against third-party trackers, but not so much against the data that it sends itself to Google, because Mozillas incomings are by Google advertising companies.
Vivaldi’s business model is different, by default include links and search engines from sponsores and only recive incommings if the user use these, but he’s free to delete these if he don’t. Apart of Donations (only after the massive request of the user and a Store with merchandising.
Maybe also som comissions by Renault, to include Vivaldi in it’s navigation system, and from Pole Staras default Browser in it’s Navigator, the first browser optimized for these uses in the market, not bad for a small team. As in the past also the first which accept vertical text for asiatic users.
Gecko is in no way controlled by Google though, and and implementing APIs is different from relying on code Google implements. The discussion isn’t regarding what Mozilla website sends to Alphabet, but whether Firefox has an independent browser engine implementation that’s not based on Blink. You keep conflating Mozilla website and Firefox browser which are two completely separate things. Please show me where these APIs you refer to in Firefox are that can’t be deactivated.
We’ve had this discussion before, and I really don’t see the point of rehashing it. I see anything based on Blink as being inherently compromised and you aren’t going to change my mind on that.
Yes Gecko isn’t from Google, it’s Mozillas own engine, but as I said before, this don’t change the fact that Mozillas existence is also based by the advising subvencions of Google. At least if you need to sync your data, you do it in the servers of Mozilla, even if you use a fork instead of Firefox.
And yes, we had this discusion before and I know that Blink isn’t compromised, not more than any other engine, what is compromised is the Chromium as is and all forks who only put little more as the own logo on it, not the case in Vivaldi, nor in Brave and some others (certainly few).
Vivaldi is as private as FF, both are the best browsers out there today, out of over 100 existing browsers. Where I do not change my opinion that Firefox is praised as the most private and best for using its own engine developed 20 years ago, like Blink, when even Google still followed its motto of ‘don’t be evil’, and other as crap because they decided to use Chromium as a base, which is profoundly false.
I use also Firefox as second browser and know well the difference to FF and Vivaldi, it’s the same between a simple Letter opener and a Swiss Army Knife. Vivaldi is on the way to be more an online OS than a simple browser, nothing to do with any other.
But ultimately, the best browser is the one that best suits the needs that each one has, for you it is FF and for me it is Vivaldi since 6 years. Everything else is more or less irrelevant, in today’s network other things that really endanger a free network are much more important, not the brand of the car you use to travel, if it can do this witout problems.
Yes Gecko isn’t from Google, it’s Mozillas own engine, but as I said before, this don’t change the fact that Mozillas existence is also based by the advising subvencions of Google.
Yes, Mozilla gets a lot of money from deals with Google. However, you have yet to show how that translates into any negative impact on the design of Gecko.
The value of Gecko is that it’s an independent implementation of web standards. This is what allows us to know that there are standards as opposed to web being tied to implementation details of Blink engine. Having at least two independent implementations of the standards is crucial for standards to be meaningful.
I’m not arguing against your preference for Vivaldi. I think Blink based browsers work fine at the moment. My concern is with Blink becoming the only game in town in the long term.
Don’t forget your sync password, even Vivaldi don’t have access to it and your data, there is no recovering mail, if you forget your password, you lose your synced data. The price of privacy.
Vivaldi has a own Password manager, but yes, you can use also Keepass instead. But at least I don’t use Keepass, because Vivaldi sync not only my passwords, it sync all settings, themes, extensions, notes, bookmarks, reader list, history and autocomplete data of the websites. Very usefull, not only to sync with other PCs, also as Backup, if your PC break and you have to buy another one, there yo can install Vivaldi and log in your account, all this datas are restored in few seconds, having the same Vivaldi as you had ost in the old PC.
If you creat an account in the community, you also get access to your own mail with 5Gb (xxxxx@vivaldi.com) and a free blog for your private use.
Yes, for security it needs 2FA, currently this methode don’t have an alternative, but in the community (very friendly) you can ask the team to use alternativly another mail instead of the phone. AFAIK there was also some time ago who had only a normal cable phone, without the possibility to receive a text message with the activation code and because of this, he also could use a mail direction instead. The phone number isn’t stored by Vivaldi, it’s only used to send you a message with the activation code, for nothing else.
If you had read the reasons, you know why the UI script has copyright, but 100% of the Vivaldi script is auditable, and even the UI part is moddeable by the user, it’s only prohibet to fork it to use it in another browser. Proprietary, yes, but not the same as in Chrome or Edge, with a big proprietary part over Chromium, but completly closed source not auditable, where nobody knows for what they are good for.
Thanks. I understand your effort to promote Vivaldi, and I too loved Opera and its UI. but, sadly, Vivaldi is proprietary software and uses a bunch of google services and dependencies, it even is based on google’s blink rendering engine, so it is not only far from being a privacy/ethical browser, it is walking in the wrong direction, helping google incrrase its monopoly and not letting people use their freedoms with software. If you don’t work within Vivaldi yourself, I suggest you check browsers like Librewolf, which I recommend for tech savy people. For most people I just recommend Firefox.
Which Google services do you mean? A engine from 20 years ago isn’t the thing that import of the Google monopoly. Vivaldi helps in nothing to increas the incomming of Google )at least if you don’t use the Google search). You help more to Google using Mozilla products, which are sponsored by Google, using it’s advertising companies NEST and Alphabet.inc.
Vivaldi’s base is a partially degoogled Chromium, leaving the rest of Google APIs as option in the privacy settings.
The engine has noyhing to do, even if it wasmade by Google and several other companies, IBM, Samsung, and some others, like WebKit based in KHTML made by the German KDE.
For similar reasons you can say, that you never use TOR, because it was made by the CIA and the US army, same as the Onion.
Yes, Vivaldi us proprietary, because 5% of the script, only respect the UI, has copyright, the rest is FOSS . All is auditable 100%.
Yes, but as you can see in the second screenshot, which you’ll find in the settings, it remains in the user choice to use these or not. You can desmark all of tthe services, but at least if you need a google service, f.exmpl for study or professional use in companies, you have to accept Crypto Token, without, non of the Google services will work and Webstore when you want to download any extension from tehe store, without you can’t. Even Brave has this, but there you don’t have the option to desmark it, also FF and degoogled Chromiums at least use the Crypto Token, only in Vivaldi is optional, in none of the others.
Anyway, the biggest problem isn’t a browser more or less private, it’s the privacy in the webpage itself, who tracks the user with the dirties tricks. A browser only can block the worst, but with much, not all, nor TOR with VPN can do this.
Read this https://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~asenol/leaky-forms/
Among others the e-mail tracking
“The privacy risks for users are that they will be tracked even more efficiently; they can be tracked across different websites, across different sessions, across mobile and desktop,” Acar says. “An email address is such a useful identifier for tracking, because it’s global, it’s unique, it’s constant. You can’t clear it like you clear your cookies. It’s a very powerful identifier”
Even only visiting thousends o the webpages, they use key and mouse tracking methodes to profile you, knowing exactly what you are looking for, even if you are only scrolling in this page.
I mainly use Andisearch, because it has a own reader mode, wich permits to read the content of almost all page in the search results, using Andisearch as front-end, which is really a good methode that other search engines should implement. The Peekier search at least shows the thumbnaul preview of a page instead of the simple title and URL in the results.
That is the real problem today, not so the browser if you don’t use directly Chrome, Edge, Yandex, or plain Chromium itself, apart of some common sense, the best privacy tool of all.
I would, and I do not believe these forks would be able to maintain momentum on their own in case Google made significant changes to Chromium that negatively affected user experience.
Vivaldi isn’t a simple fork of Chromium, it’s Chromium where the devs have removed a lot of Google crap, leaving only the essential at the choice of the user in the privacy settings to permit the compatibility with the Google services which they may use. Vivaldi isn’t even compatible with the Chrome Store, if you remove all APIs in the settings. The team of Vivaldi is small, but very good in what they do. Until now, all intents of Google to track the users in the Chromiums, Idle.API, FLOC, etc, in Vivaldi don’t work.
Sure, but Vivaldi has not changed the core rendering engine. That’s the most complex part of the browser. If Google ever takes this in a direction that’s hostile to the users, I do not believe that keeping up with Google independently will be practical for Vivaldi.
There are only three engines out there, Gecko from Firefox, Blink in Chromium and WebKit in Safari. Google can’t block it, because this will cause of a head-on confrontation against several large companies, including Microsoft and therefore would be equivalent to commercial suicide for Google, Chromium is FOSS and even Google can change this.
Naturally it will continue to try to add different tracking APIs to Chromium, which are also regularly retired by companies that rely on the privacy of their browser, as Vivaldi has been doing for years. Google also managed to damage many Chromium forks, by removing Google Sync, but this had no effect on Vivaldi either, by using its own server for this function, this one that many other chromiums now lack, including Brave.
Chromium along with its derivatives controls vast majority of the market, and Microsoft is already using Blink as their engine for Edge. Any user hostile features Google introduces will likely be seen as a positive by other corporations like Microsoft, so not really seeing them complaining.
As I said, changes like trackers and the store are superficial. The real meat is in the rendering engine, and if that gets significant changes to prevent stuff like ad blockers that are hard to work around then browsers like Vivaldi will have a problem because at that point they would have to start maintaining their own version of the engine.
Incidentally, this is why we have WebKit and Blink. Google and Apple disagreed on how the rendering engine should work and Google forked it. Now these have diverged significantly. Google was able to do this because they have effectively unlimited resources, I don’t see how a small company would be able to do the same.
The engine in Chromium IS Blink, used by all Chromium forks, not only by Edge. All current engines are directly or indirectly controlled by Google, also Gecko, all of these needs certain GoogleAPIs for no loosing the compatibility of most webpages. F.Exmple, without using the Google Crypto Token API, you can’t acces to any Google services, which a lot of people and companies use. This API is permantently active in all browsers, only in Vivaldi you can desactivate it in the settings when you don’t use any Google services. As I say, Google can’t block the Chromium nor revoce the FOSS status, but he don’t need to do this, because he controlled the webpages wich include all type of tracking systems frm Google, not only the Google analytics and tracking APIs from Alphabet and NEST, (Googles advertising companies, also Mozilla do this, but not Vivaldi, this is the difference, not only because it’s a European cooperative, not a US company like others. You can only opt out of this tracking, requesting it directly in Alphabet, with your personal data.
Ok, Firefox is obviously an excellent browser, but not as private as it is always claimed, it protects you well against third-party trackers, but not so much against the data that it sends itself to Google, because Mozillas incomings are by Google advertising companies. Vivaldi’s business model is different, by default include links and search engines from sponsores and only recive incommings if the user use these, but he’s free to delete these if he don’t. Apart of Donations (only after the massive request of the user and a Store with merchandising. Maybe also som comissions by Renault, to include Vivaldi in it’s navigation system, and from Pole Staras default Browser in it’s Navigator, the first browser optimized for these uses in the market, not bad for a small team. As in the past also the first which accept vertical text for asiatic users.
Gecko is in no way controlled by Google though, and and implementing APIs is different from relying on code Google implements. The discussion isn’t regarding what Mozilla website sends to Alphabet, but whether Firefox has an independent browser engine implementation that’s not based on Blink. You keep conflating Mozilla website and Firefox browser which are two completely separate things. Please show me where these APIs you refer to in Firefox are that can’t be deactivated.
We’ve had this discussion before, and I really don’t see the point of rehashing it. I see anything based on Blink as being inherently compromised and you aren’t going to change my mind on that.
Yes Gecko isn’t from Google, it’s Mozillas own engine, but as I said before, this don’t change the fact that Mozillas existence is also based by the advising subvencions of Google. At least if you need to sync your data, you do it in the servers of Mozilla, even if you use a fork instead of Firefox. And yes, we had this discusion before and I know that Blink isn’t compromised, not more than any other engine, what is compromised is the Chromium as is and all forks who only put little more as the own logo on it, not the case in Vivaldi, nor in Brave and some others (certainly few).
Vivaldi is as private as FF, both are the best browsers out there today, out of over 100 existing browsers. Where I do not change my opinion that Firefox is praised as the most private and best for using its own engine developed 20 years ago, like Blink, when even Google still followed its motto of ‘don’t be evil’, and other as crap because they decided to use Chromium as a base, which is profoundly false. I use also Firefox as second browser and know well the difference to FF and Vivaldi, it’s the same between a simple Letter opener and a Swiss Army Knife. Vivaldi is on the way to be more an online OS than a simple browser, nothing to do with any other.
But ultimately, the best browser is the one that best suits the needs that each one has, for you it is FF and for me it is Vivaldi since 6 years. Everything else is more or less irrelevant, in today’s network other things that really endanger a free network are much more important, not the brand of the car you use to travel, if it can do this witout problems.
Yes, Mozilla gets a lot of money from deals with Google. However, you have yet to show how that translates into any negative impact on the design of Gecko.
The value of Gecko is that it’s an independent implementation of web standards. This is what allows us to know that there are standards as opposed to web being tied to implementation details of Blink engine. Having at least two independent implementations of the standards is crucial for standards to be meaningful.
I’m not arguing against your preference for Vivaldi. I think Blink based browsers work fine at the moment. My concern is with Blink becoming the only game in town in the long term.
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Don’t forget your sync password, even Vivaldi don’t have access to it and your data, there is no recovering mail, if you forget your password, you lose your synced data. The price of privacy.
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Vivaldi has a own Password manager, but yes, you can use also Keepass instead. But at least I don’t use Keepass, because Vivaldi sync not only my passwords, it sync all settings, themes, extensions, notes, bookmarks, reader list, history and autocomplete data of the websites. Very usefull, not only to sync with other PCs, also as Backup, if your PC break and you have to buy another one, there yo can install Vivaldi and log in your account, all this datas are restored in few seconds, having the same Vivaldi as you had ost in the old PC. If you creat an account in the community, you also get access to your own mail with 5Gb (
xxxxx@vivaldi.com) and a free blog for your private use.deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Yes, for security it needs 2FA, currently this methode don’t have an alternative, but in the community (very friendly) you can ask the team to use alternativly another mail instead of the phone. AFAIK there was also some time ago who had only a normal cable phone, without the possibility to receive a text message with the activation code and because of this, he also could use a mail direction instead. The phone number isn’t stored by Vivaldi, it’s only used to send you a message with the activation code, for nothing else.
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Vivaldi is proprietaty software… why trust it over libre software?
If you had read the reasons, you know why the UI script has copyright, but 100% of the Vivaldi script is auditable, and even the UI part is moddeable by the user, it’s only prohibet to fork it to use it in another browser. Proprietary, yes, but not the same as in Chrome or Edge, with a big proprietary part over Chromium, but completly closed source not auditable, where nobody knows for what they are good for.
Thanks. I understand your effort to promote Vivaldi, and I too loved Opera and its UI. but, sadly, Vivaldi is proprietary software and uses a bunch of google services and dependencies, it even is based on google’s blink rendering engine, so it is not only far from being a privacy/ethical browser, it is walking in the wrong direction, helping google incrrase its monopoly and not letting people use their freedoms with software. If you don’t work within Vivaldi yourself, I suggest you check browsers like Librewolf, which I recommend for tech savy people. For most people I just recommend Firefox.
Which Google services do you mean? A engine from 20 years ago isn’t the thing that import of the Google monopoly. Vivaldi helps in nothing to increas the incomming of Google )at least if you don’t use the Google search). You help more to Google using Mozilla products, which are sponsored by Google, using it’s advertising companies NEST and Alphabet.inc. Vivaldi’s base is a partially degoogled Chromium, leaving the rest of Google APIs as option in the privacy settings. The engine has noyhing to do, even if it wasmade by Google and several other companies, IBM, Samsung, and some others, like WebKit based in KHTML made by the German KDE. For similar reasons you can say, that you never use TOR, because it was made by the CIA and the US army, same as the Onion. Yes, Vivaldi us proprietary, because 5% of the script, only respect the UI, has copyright, the rest is FOSS . All is auditable 100%.
https://avoidthehack.com/review-vivaldi-browser
Yes, but as you can see in the second screenshot, which you’ll find in the settings, it remains in the user choice to use these or not. You can desmark all of tthe services, but at least if you need a google service, f.exmpl for study or professional use in companies, you have to accept Crypto Token, without, non of the Google services will work and Webstore when you want to download any extension from tehe store, without you can’t. Even Brave has this, but there you don’t have the option to desmark it, also FF and degoogled Chromiums at least use the Crypto Token, only in Vivaldi is optional, in none of the others. Anyway, the biggest problem isn’t a browser more or less private, it’s the privacy in the webpage itself, who tracks the user with the dirties tricks. A browser only can block the worst, but with much, not all, nor TOR with VPN can do this. Read this https://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~asenol/leaky-forms/ Among others the e-mail tracking
Even only visiting thousends o the webpages, they use key and mouse tracking methodes to profile you, knowing exactly what you are looking for, even if you are only scrolling in this page.
I mainly use Andisearch, because it has a own reader mode, wich permits to read the content of almost all page in the search results, using Andisearch as front-end, which is really a good methode that other search engines should implement. The Peekier search at least shows the thumbnaul preview of a page instead of the simple title and URL in the results. That is the real problem today, not so the browser if you don’t use directly Chrome, Edge, Yandex, or plain Chromium itself, apart of some common sense, the best privacy tool of all.
Give me one reason why Vivaldi could be superior to Librewolf in terms of privacy and resilience