• Zerush
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    2 years ago

    The Engine in Vivaldi has as base Chromium, but that didn’t mean that te maintance work is minor than in Gecko, see https://lemmy.ml/post/361337. Vivaldi is a coop own by it’s employees, they have ca 20 devs for 5 OS. Mozilla have their own engine, Gecko, but the work to update and patch is now rhe same as Vivaldi has with Chromium. You would be right that the Chromium browsers already have 99% of the work done, if Vivaldi were just a simple fork like others, which is not the case. The main expenses for a company, be it Mozilla or Vivaldi, is the infrastructure they have (server, tax expenses, personnel, etc.). Vivaldi has no outside investors and refuses to have any in order to preserve independence, von Tetzchner set up the cooperative with his own money. Now it is financed, as I said before, apart from donations (introduced at the insistence of users), sponsor links and default search engines (alliances with DDG, Ecosia and others), which pay when the user uses them, otherwise it is free. to delete them, apart a webstore with Merch. There are no advertisers involved, no google analytics or other google tracking or fingerprinting APIs. Apart Vivaldi offers for the user a own blog and a own webmail with 5Gb (xxxxx@vivaldi.net). Inbuild in the Browser a Feedreader, Mail client and Calendar, among other features which nobody else have or only partial with a lot of extensions. Yes, part of the UI is proprietary soft (~5%) but full aditable and customizable by the user (with knowledge in scripts). In the community they show how.