privacy and FLOSS advocates are mostly the same people

In my experience this is only partially true. Free Software advocates value privacy (such that the most highly regarded “privacy browser” is GNU IceCat, which is a synthesis of Mozilla technology and GNU philosophy), but privacy advocates do not really value software freedom, and frequently sometimes trash FOSS in order to promote proprietary “privacy friendly” apps like Vivaldi. They will claim that it doesn’t matter if it’s FOSS or not as long as it is “privacy focused” and they will make this claim even in nominally “FOSS” focused spaces on e.g. reddit, as if to say that the Free Software movement is worthless except as a means to privacy.

It’s refreshing to see some push back against the “FOSS doesn’t matter” idea here on Lemmy.

edit: word choice

All the code of Vivaldi is open for audit, only a part of the code of theUI is obfuscated for comercial use, because if not, the big ones fork it and Vivaldi dies, apart Vivaldi itself permit the user to mod this part, include explains how in the Forum. Jon von Tetschner want to repeat the same error as with the old Opera and is the first one which is against Google influence and user tracking, he don’t like to loss again a browser with a different perspective and centerd in the user needs to big companies which violate this principles. The best proof of this is, when in previous versions of Vivaldi, Google prevented access to certain services and websites with discriminatory browsersniffing, when Vivaldi appeared in the UA string, supposedly due to lack of compatibility, which was naturally nonsense. This after von Tezchner’s interview where he asked Google to go back to his motto of ‘Don’t be evil’. Vivaldi, therefore, eliminate the name of the UA, against his own interests, in favor of the user. All the functions and tools that Vivaldi includes by default are included based on requests and user votes. Even what this thread is about, including a donation button, is due to multiple requests from users, not Vivaldi’s decision and it has lasted a long time until they accepted it.

P.S. Blink’s father is KDE and like all engines FOSS and with much more potential than Gecko and especially Apple’s outdated WebKit. There have been no other viable engines for 20 years, others have already disappeared, such as Presto, Trident and others, due to their inability to work with new web standards… Not everything that says ‘proprietary’ is automatically wrong and abusive, and not everything that says FOSS is a panacea. FOSS is certainly preferable in apps and in different areas for several reasons, but in other areas, such as browsers, it is currently irrelevant, there other things count. It makes no sense to launch other forks, be it Firefox or Chromium, in an already saturated market, if it does not offer something different, it will only erode the list of ‘discontinued’ like fifty before, See list of browsers on Wiki. This helps no one, not the user and not the developers.