I know that many reject Vivaldi, because he is not entirely FOSS and only listed as Free-Proprietary, although I think that it is not at all fair to compare it for this with others in this category. The small part, about 5% of the code is obfuscated for good reasons. However, it does not prevent the user from modifying it to their liking and it is even encouraged by Vivaldi, but it does prevent large companies (Google) from making a fork of Vivaldi and thereby destroying this still small cooperative.
Vivaldi features are implemented because of upvoted user requests, for this it’s wrong to say that nobody need this. Inbuild features always better as extensions because of privacy. If you want a browser only for post in a social network and for read your mail, yes, for this are FF or Chrome, but if you are a student, or a professional, you will like the webpanel, where you can have some social media, Wiki or something else, while you have two or more webs in mosaic view in the screen, taking notes with markup or past them from the context menu, which is, like everything in Vivaldi, customizable You can stack the tabs in tree and save them as session, or hibernate them to save memory, You have a screenshot tool for part or the whole page, clock with pomodoro timer, menu with page actions and filters, own sync encrypted end2end, page translation which is not from Google translate, you can quit all Google APIs in the settings if you want…a few examples of some features. FF or Chrome can do this? As I say, try it, it don’t bite you.
I didn’t say that. I said the target users of FF and Chrome don’t need them, so Google and Mozilla have no motivation to “fork” (much less “kill”) Vivaldi.
I have tried Vivaldi, I know it’s deal. It was my main browser when I first started my power user journey and was for a long time. It was only like a year ago that I switched to Firefox because I started to care more about open source and privacy.
Privacy is certainly very important nowadays, but looking only at FOSS is not an answer, I think it is a mistake to believe that FOSS is automatically synonymous with privacy and security, which is false. The best example is Chromium and certain OpenSource APIs from Google and Facebook, content in Chromium and others in many apps, be careful with this then. FF is not an exception in this either, the same official Mozilla page will give you a tracker as soon as you enter, if you don’t block it. What prevails today is what no one does, stay away from the big monopolies and bother to read the content of the licenses, the TOS and the Privacy policy of the things that are used, this can lead to many surprises, no Always good If you use a VPN, do you know one that is FOSS and is it worth it? Do you think that using TOR, developed by the US defense and the NSA, really protects your privacy? If you use a self-hosted webapp, if you don’t have your own server, does the host you hire offer you a lot of privacy? OpenSource is a good initiative for many products, it allows free collaboration and has many other advantages, but can we forget about this for private developers who create a closed Source app to earn their livelihood, without further pretense and with respect to privacy without Do you hit? As a user, you do not improve your freedom on the web, just by using FOSS, it does not help you that the code is open, if you are not a programmer and then it will not be easy for you to review sometimes millions of lines of code to see where they point (try them with the FF code). It is useful if you want to create a fork of your own app, or use part of the code for another project. If not, it is of no use to you, more than the faith that protects your privacy because it is FOSS. Any app, FOSS or not, is only as good as the community or company behind it. There is no more than this. At least I prefer to use European applications before those of the US or China.
And that is when you rely on the community for that. As long as 1 programmer can see what’s up and explain it to the rest with proof from the source, we are all up to date with everything that’s going on behind the scenes. That’s why we have Ungoogled Chromium and LibreWolf. That is why there was so much commotion when Brave some referral links (or whatever it was, I don’t remember), they were visible in the source code. This is not possible with Vivaldi.
You may say there’s no advantages to something being FOSS, but you’re not saying there’s any disadvantages either. I say there’s many advantages to FOSS, like the one I said above. Therefore I remain convinced that FOSS is better than proprietary in most circumstances (including Vivaldi).
You gave a bunch of valid examples about FOSS projects not necessarily being trustable just because they’re FOSS. They are still FOSS though. People can see how things work and if there’s anything shady that’s happening. As I said before you don’t have to be a programmer for this; If the project is popular there’s bound to be people who’re gonna examine it for you. It’s not automatically better, but it’s an extra level of trust towards the devs.
Yeah, and if an app is proprietary the community’s quality is gonna suffer.
Vivaldi makes money from search engines and default bookmarks. Making it FOSS will not change that. Yes, someone will make a fork and strip all that stuff from the browser. No, it’s not gonna be as popular as Vivaldi. LibreWolf does not have as many users as Firefox and Ungoogled Chromium does not have as many users as Chrome.
Vivaldi let in the choice of the user how much privacy like to have. FF and Mozilla forks not. As I say before, only entering in Mozilla.org, they put you a tracker from Alphabet Inc
Privacy?
What do you think how many lines of the script of FF or forks are pointing to Google? Their code also is financed by Google, without a choice from the user like in Vivaldi.
For this I prefer an CE Browser, privacy norms in the US don’t exists.
FOSS isn’t a sinonym of privacy, nor security.
Search a degoogled Geck Engine, and Gecko also is at the end of possibilities and also FF in the future go to Blink, this is a fact.
And Firefox doesn’t? What is the difference? What is it about privacy that Vivaldi “gives you an option for” and Firefox doesn’t?
With Firefox I can check. With Vivaldi I can’t check. Vivaldi may have thousands of lines pointing to Google for all we know (though I’m sure that’s not true, it’s an example).
Google pays Mozilla to keep them as the default search engine. Don’t make it sound like Google controls everything that goes in the source code of Firefox. Also even if they did, as I said before, Firefox is open source, so I can check.
I don’t understand what this sentence means nor why it is a “fact”.
You’re really missing my point here on purpose just to defend Vivaldi. If it’s so good, so much better than Firefox, so much more private, with 0 references to Google in the code, then why isn’t it FOSS so I can see for myself? You haven’t given me a single reason for why it shouldn’t be FOSS. Repeating “Vivaldi better than Firefox” doesn’t answer my question.