• @Zerush
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    52 years ago

    If I had to choose between Chrome or Firefox, I would also choose Firefox without thinking twice, but the statement that there are more extensions in Firefox than Chrome is simply false, in the Mozilla Store there are only a fraction of the extensions that are in the Chrome Store. I know perfectly well, I have Firefox and Vivaldi, which doesn’t track you either, and I know how many extensions are available for each one, there is no comparison. Pretty much every privacy and functional extension also exists in Chrome and much more.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      122 years ago

      Most of them are just forks of Chromium that make superficial changes though. Firefox and Safari are the only alternative engines comparable to Chromium at the moment.

        • d-RLY?
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          62 years ago

          While they do make some good/fun changes to Chromium, they are still just forks of the same base. If all browsers just become based on Chromium, we still lose out from a code base point of view. Just like we already see with all iOS browsers. I worry that we are seeing a new IE situation, just with the ability to put different skins and some additional features. Even if those features are well done and honestly bring some good functions (I am a fan of Vivaldi’s built-in gesture and visual customizations and Brave’s attempts to try something different with ads and crypto). But a major exploit in Chromium creates a situation where all other browsers based on it will also be exploitable. Even today I still run into moments where something goes wrong with something a site has changed breaks all my Chromium browsers, but Firefox works without issue. Obviously a random thing with limited situations. I was happy to see Chrome and Chromium join IE, Firefox, and Safari in the browser competition and aiding in the push to make web standards be respected. As we already saw how much IE’s disregard for following standards lead to it being the literal only option for fake reasons. We also have seen how Apple’s Safari is trying to do the same thing in a very large amount of the mobile/tablet space.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
          link
          52 years ago

          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.

          • @Zerush
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            2 years ago

            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.

            • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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              42 years ago

              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.

              • @Zerush
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                12 years ago

                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.

                • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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                  42 years ago

                  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.

            • @blkpws
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              5 months ago

              deleted by creator

              • @Zerush
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                32 years ago

                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.

                • @blkpws
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                  5 months ago

                  deleted by creator

            • @geoma
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              12 years ago

              Vivaldi is proprietaty software… why trust it over libre software?

              • @Zerush
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                02 years ago

                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.

                • @geoma
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                  2 years ago

                  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.