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Interesting - I’ll try it out, quite curious to see how it compares with Vivaldi, which has an Opera-like UI with the Chromium engine.

lucideer 8y ago
Otter predates Vivaldi (at least publicly)—I think Otter started very very soon after Opera 12 was discontinued. It's also open source (which imo was Opera's downfall), and uses an engine that is not the dominant one on the market (albeit a close cousin); I think both of these points are on its favour. On the other hand, Vivaldi seems to have more resources behind it, as well as the name of Jon von Tetzchner, which helps adoption. It just seems to be making the same mistakes Opera did (closed source, so the community can never bring it forward independently), with the added downside of being really no different from the market leader under the hood (rendering).
- Jitnaught_ 8y ago
  Vivaldi's source code is available https://vivaldi.com/source/ https://vivaldi.com/source/
  - em-bee 8y ago
    interesting, like the poster above i am fairly certain to remember that vivaldi was closed source at one point. i could not find any mention of the license anywhere on the site, so i dug it out of the source archive to find a 3-clause BSD license. very nice!
    - lucideer 8y ago
      Vivaldi is definitely proprietary so I seriously doubt that license you found is for the browser as a whole; it may just be for a library the browser uses internally, among many others.
      - em-bee 8y ago
        it was the LICENSE file at the top level of the source archive. if that didn't apply to the whole of the source archive then it should have specified that. it could of course be that the source archive is not complete and there are non-free dependencies, or that there are exceptions in some subdirectories EDIT: the README contains this: Use of original work by Vivaldi Technologies contained in this source code package is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file. Other works are governed by their original licensing terms. those other works are chromium and a few other things, all on FOSS licenses. there is also no mention of other dependencies.
        vatueil 8y ago
        According to this answer from Vivaldi it sounds like the public source is only partial (the Chromium source code and any direct changes Vivaldi made to it): https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ > Is Vivaldi Open Source? > Vivaldi is not made available under one unified open source license. It does contain the Chromium source code with changes made to allow the HTML/CSS/JS based UI to run. All changes to the Chromium source code are made available under a BSD license and can be read by anyone on vivaldi.com/source/. Details in this regard are explained in the the README and LICENSE files within the package. > In addition, our UI code is written in plain, accessible code for those who read HTML, CSS and JS. This means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit. > Vivaldi also contains third party code. Licenses for these parts can be found in the source package and in the installed browser by navigating to vivaldi://credits This reddit comment explains in a bit more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_vivaldi_completely_opensource/de8h5kr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_v...
        signal11 8y ago
        From the Reddit comment: > Vivaldi runs as a React app on top of Chromium, but to make that possible, they had to make changes to the way Chromium works (likely how it handles extensions). That’s really interesting — their UI is pretty fast and responsive, so even if it’s not FOSS it’s an interesting approach to dig into. Would anyone knowledgeable be able to compare this with the Electron-based approach most other Chromium customisers use?
  - lucideer 8y ago
    Opera 12s source is also available, yet it would still be illegal for someone to fork it as it'sa closed licence. Available source is not open source—the difference is having a legal right to continue development.
    - userbinator 8y ago
      Of course, legality doesn't stop some people ;-) There have been very interesting creations, like 10 versions of Windows on one live DVD, made by those who couldn't care less about the legal aspects. Such a "underground" browser would be an interesting thing indeed... there was a discussion here on HN about the source code leak not long ago.
      - lucideer 8y ago
        I'd very very much like to see such an underground effort. We can dream...

lucideer 8y ago

Otter predates Vivaldi (at least publicly)—I think Otter started very very soon after Opera 12 was discontinued. It's also open source (which imo was Opera's downfall), and uses an engine that is not the dominant one on the market (albeit a close cousin); I think both of these points are on its favour. On the other hand, Vivaldi seems to have more resources behind it, as well as the name of Jon von Tetzchner, which helps adoption. It just seems to be making the same mistakes Opera did (closed source, so the community can never bring it forward independently), with the added downside of being really no different from the market leader under the hood (rendering).

Jitnaught_ 8y ago
Vivaldi's source code is available https://vivaldi.com/source/ https://vivaldi.com/source/
- em-bee 8y ago
  interesting, like the poster above i am fairly certain to remember that vivaldi was closed source at one point. i could not find any mention of the license anywhere on the site, so i dug it out of the source archive to find a 3-clause BSD license. very nice!
  - lucideer 8y ago
    Vivaldi is definitely proprietary so I seriously doubt that license you found is for the browser as a whole; it may just be for a library the browser uses internally, among many others.
    - em-bee 8y ago
      it was the LICENSE file at the top level of the source archive. if that didn't apply to the whole of the source archive then it should have specified that. it could of course be that the source archive is not complete and there are non-free dependencies, or that there are exceptions in some subdirectories EDIT: the README contains this: Use of original work by Vivaldi Technologies contained in this source code package is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file. Other works are governed by their original licensing terms. those other works are chromium and a few other things, all on FOSS licenses. there is also no mention of other dependencies.
      - vatueil 8y ago
        According to this answer from Vivaldi it sounds like the public source is only partial (the Chromium source code and any direct changes Vivaldi made to it): https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/ > Is Vivaldi Open Source? > Vivaldi is not made available under one unified open source license. It does contain the Chromium source code with changes made to allow the HTML/CSS/JS based UI to run. All changes to the Chromium source code are made available under a BSD license and can be read by anyone on vivaldi.com/source/. Details in this regard are explained in the the README and LICENSE files within the package. > In addition, our UI code is written in plain, accessible code for those who read HTML, CSS and JS. This means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit. > Vivaldi also contains third party code. Licenses for these parts can be found in the source package and in the installed browser by navigating to vivaldi://credits This reddit comment explains in a bit more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_vivaldi_completely_opensource/de8h5kr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/5vwihr/is_v...
        signal11 8y ago
        From the Reddit comment: > Vivaldi runs as a React app on top of Chromium, but to make that possible, they had to make changes to the way Chromium works (likely how it handles extensions). That’s really interesting — their UI is pretty fast and responsive, so even if it’s not FOSS it’s an interesting approach to dig into. Would anyone knowledgeable be able to compare this with the Electron-based approach most other Chromium customisers use?
- lucideer 8y ago
  Opera 12s source is also available, yet it would still be illegal for someone to fork it as it'sa closed licence. Available source is not open source—the difference is having a legal right to continue development.
  - userbinator 8y ago
    Of course, legality doesn't stop some people ;-) There have been very interesting creations, like 10 versions of Windows on one live DVD, made by those who couldn't care less about the legal aspects. Such a "underground" browser would be an interesting thing indeed... there was a discussion here on HN about the source code leak not long ago.
    - lucideer 8y ago
      I'd very very much like to see such an underground effort. We can dream...