Vivaldi, Brave, and their stans are getting their pitchforks ready, forgetting that they don’t have to do the hard work of developing an engine because Google already does that for them.
I don’t know about how Vivaldi works, but Brave stans can shut up. Their ad system is a hundred times worse than Mozilla’s.
I mean, I don’t like how they went about this either, but considering the alternative of a 100% Google dominated browser space, and the fact that you can just disable it and the base Firefox code is still open source, it’s not a huge deal.
Yeah, I’m not really defending them (from my point of view any feature that does something without my knowledge or consent being turned on by default is unacceptable) but from my point of view they’ll always have to dance with a devil of some sort. I say people are going to complain no matter what based on past experiences: e.g. the “sponsored content on new tab”, where they made sure to run all the “recommendation” logic locally so that no data was being sent out of the browser, that still wasn’t enough because “ads are bad.” So maybe from Mozilla’s point of view there is no incentive to try to make these folks happy. People complained whenever they tried to offer Pocket or the VPN thing or the password manager because those weren’t “core products” but they’re also not allowed to monetize the “core product” either. It’s like these people expect Mozilla to be able to synthesize money from air.
And, I am not really sure of the value of suggesting Vivaldi (which is vehemently anti-free software) or Brave (dodgy crypto scheme) which also further Google’s dominance over the modern web as a side effect, when we have community versions of Firefox such as LibreWolf or IceCat which are basically the Gecko equivalent of those shady Chromium clones.
The Vivaldi UI is truly what makes the browser unique. As such, it is our most valuable asset in terms of code.
We don’t publish it under an open-source license and only release obfuscated versions of it.
If a new project based on our code implements features that are fundamentally against our ethics (damaging to human rights or to the environment in some way, for instance)
Even though most of the security-relevant code for Vivaldi browser is in Chromium, there is some security-relevant code in the UI as well.
Vivaldi just works so wonderful. Once you use it you can’t go back (Check out the in browser mail client). I really wish they were FOSS though.
It doesn’t matter to me how much better Vivaldi works over Firefox or even Base Chromium. TBH, this is just something I’m willing to sacrifice in the name of FLOSS. iPhones and Macs are amazingly user friendly too, but I still avoid them like the plague because of Apple’s absolute hatred of FLOSS and especially Right to Repair.
Well, would you not say UX ease depends on audience? I love me a bunch of fast CLI tools on Linux, and nothing comes close to processing thousands of JPGs as jpegoptim. I also like GUI tools. Ease of use is contextual, and in fact a lot of people struggle with Apple devices that are familiar with Windows and Android.
I don’t know about how Vivaldi works, but Brave stans can shut up. Their ad system is a hundred times worse than Mozilla’s.
I mean, I don’t like how they went about this either, but considering the alternative of a 100% Google dominated browser space, and the fact that you can just disable it and the base Firefox code is still open source, it’s not a huge deal.
Yeah, I’m not really defending them (from my point of view any feature that does something without my knowledge or consent being turned on by default is unacceptable) but from my point of view they’ll always have to dance with a devil of some sort. I say people are going to complain no matter what based on past experiences: e.g. the “sponsored content on new tab”, where they made sure to run all the “recommendation” logic locally so that no data was being sent out of the browser, that still wasn’t enough because “ads are bad.” So maybe from Mozilla’s point of view there is no incentive to try to make these folks happy. People complained whenever they tried to offer Pocket or the VPN thing or the password manager because those weren’t “core products” but they’re also not allowed to monetize the “core product” either. It’s like these people expect Mozilla to be able to synthesize money from air.
And, I am not really sure of the value of suggesting Vivaldi (which is vehemently anti-free software) or Brave (dodgy crypto scheme) which also further Google’s dominance over the modern web as a side effect, when we have community versions of Firefox such as LibreWolf or IceCat which are basically the Gecko equivalent of those shady Chromium clones.
I think I’m starting to come around to Drew DeVault’s position that it is impossible to implement the web as it exists today.
Vivaldi is closed source. It uses Chromium’s base and adds its closed code on top of it and claims it improves security and performance.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/
TL;DR another privacy grifter
I rarely use closed source software. My exceptions are
Vivaldi just works so wonderful. Once you use it you can’t go back (Check out the in browser mail client). I really wish they were FOSS though.
Isn’t some parts of ddg open source?
Anyway. I use searx. If you don’t like searx https://metager.org/ might be a good one for you.
It doesn’t matter to me how much better Vivaldi works over Firefox or even Base Chromium. TBH, this is just something I’m willing to sacrifice in the name of FLOSS. iPhones and Macs are amazingly user friendly too, but I still avoid them like the plague because of Apple’s absolute hatred of FLOSS and especially Right to Repair.
Well, would you not say UX ease depends on audience? I love me a bunch of fast CLI tools on Linux, and nothing comes close to processing thousands of JPGs as jpegoptim. I also like GUI tools. Ease of use is contextual, and in fact a lot of people struggle with Apple devices that are familiar with Windows and Android.
Vivaldi is closed source, and I am going to avoid closed source stuff that acts as a gateway host for me to access the internet.
Windows can be used inside a VM, and GPU passthrough is easy to do with KVM.