20 ms·

Manifest V3, webRequest, and ad blockers

133 points by dagurp 4y ago

thedanbob 4y ago
Glad to hear it. I’ve been using Vivaldi as my main browser for a while now and I’d hate to give it up, but if it’s a choice between Vivaldi and a fully functioning ad blocker I’m probably choosing the latter.
- riidom 4y ago
  Yes, same for me. On my work laptop I use Firefox, and tried it for a few weeks without adblocker, then I gave up. I'd love to keep Vivaldi, and when there are problems with adblocking, I will give it a patient try to see how bad it actually is, but leaving the chromium world is absolutely an option here. Wonder how Firefox' market share will be influenced by this, in general.
  - bloopernova 4y ago
    I'm curious why you used Firefox without ublock origin?
terramex 4y ago
Sure, Vivaldi's AdBlocker might not be impacted a lot, but it does not matter because it is terrible anyway and it triggers every "adblock detection script" I've ever seen. While I like rest of the browser it is unusable without customised uBlock Origin. I was hoping some company would fork Chromium before Manifest V3 change and apply patches from mainline as necessary but it seems less and less likely with every day. If Vivaldi manages to patch out Google's changes and keep uBlock working as it is now they will have me as their user until heat death of the universe.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  I'm familiar with the Chromium codebase, and maintaining the Manifest web request V2 API wouldn't be a tricky patch to maintain. Even if Google rips it all out and the supporting infrastructure, a full rewrite from scratch wouldn't be too tricky. It's just a bunch of RPC calls to the right extension process from the network stack. You'd still have the downsides that Google is trying to get rid of (extensions can delay requests making the browser slow, and extensions aren't multithreaded so all web requests have to be funnelled through a single javascript thread in the extension). But we've lived with those downsides for 10+ years - I think we can keep them.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    >extensions can delay requests making the browser slow There's an older UBO wiki post showing, with their default set of rules, the onBeforeRequest() processing adds about 130ms of latency per request on an older i5 machine. It does also show that a less performance focused ad blocker adds around 420ms. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared/66cc4be09eafa020de8f9a4044ff7ed8e8fc4880 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-ABP:-effic... Of course, then you can subtract whatever performance issues loading all those ads would have caused. That math often ends up in favor of the ad blocker, even if it's not a particularly efficient one.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      0.13 ms per request is loads when you consider a typical web page (facebook homepage) has about 700 requests now, and due to the single-threaded nature of javascript they all need to be processed sequentially. Ie. thats 91 milliseconds seconds of pegging one core, just for one extension, for loading one page. It's also probably an underestimate, because it doesn't include the IPC time within Chrome, which involves at least two context switches, and the associated cache rewarming. Granted, extensions could be better implemented - for example, for URL blocking, there should be a bloom filter for allowing stuff so that the whole list doesn't need to be checked.
    - CodesInChaos 4y ago
      It costs 0.130ms or 130μs, not 130ms.
    - rasz 4y ago
      >onBeforeRequest() processing adds about 130ms of latency per request Sometimes it pays off to do some sanity checks in your head. 130ms is how long it takes for modern CPU to render 50 frames of Overwatch game. Rendering modern FPS is a LOT heavier than looking up URL in a list of 100K rules.
worble 4y ago
>As Vivaldi is built on the Chromium code, how we tackle the API change depends on how Google implements the restriction. The assurance is, whatever restrictions Google adds, in the end, we’ll look into removing them. Is this not a serious wake up call for all these companies relying on Chromium? You are staking so much of your business on a giant conglomerate that does not care about you or your users, whose only aim to sweep up as much data from the web as possible to feed their ad machine.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  It's not really a wake up call - at any time they could fork and go their own way. Just right now, they prefer to not have to pay for 1000+ engineers to work on the codebase to keep up with the pace that Google manages.
  - mort96 4y ago
    I don't think it's a preference thing. I don't think Vivaldi, or Brave, or any other company whose main product is a browser, can have the income to pay 1000+ engineers to work on the codebase to keep up with the pace of Google. Maybe it should at the very least be a wake up call to companies which can't afford the engineer-hours it takes to maintain a Chromium fork.
    - madamelic 4y ago
      There's enough of them and I am sure non-affiliated as well, they could likely scrape together enough engineering 'power' to maintain their own sane fork of Chromium. They don't need to keep pace feature-wise. I don't need a featureful browser, I want a browser that performs well.
      - nemothekid 4y ago
        >They don't need to keep pace feature-wise. Last I looked into it; the problem wasnt with features. The Chrome code base is very dynamic and if you fall behind then it becomes very hard to pull upstream patches due to the pace at which things get refactored.
ktosobcy 4y ago
Yeah... relying on Chromium and "don't be evil" Google definitely sounds like fun. It's sad that Firefox engine is so difficult to embed and we could have seen more projects using it.
- djbusby 4y ago
  Or that Rust based renderer they were working on.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    As far as I'm aware they integrated Servo into Firefox piece by piece.
    - djbusby 4y ago
      I looked. FF >92 is using Quantum Render. It also seems there is a possibility to embed it.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  The history of how Chromium got to such a dominant position is basically a history of Mozilla failing to see the next thing over the horizon.
  - JohnTHaller 4y ago
    Don't forget all the shady bundleware installers that tricked people into installing Chrome via Adobe Flash, Avast, etc. https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
  - gkbrk 4y ago
    Yes, it's due to Mozilla failing to keep up. Possibly Google paying companies to bundle Chrome with their software installers had a part as well. Perhaps putting a Chrome advertisement to the Google homepage and recommending an "upgrade" to all Google visitors played a part too. Maybe.
lemoncookiechip 4y ago
Pretty much every browser that isn't Chrome or Edge, has put out a similar message to Vivaldi's team. If that's not enough for Google to get their **** together, and stop pretending like they're doing this for the good of the end-user, I dunno what is.
drcongo 4y ago
> Vivaldi comes with [...] a built-in Mail and Calendar Why? Why on earth would anyone want those built into their web browser?
- selykg 4y ago
  Vivaldi is sort of the spiritual successor to Opera and Opera had those things built in and by the sounds of it, some people really enjoyed that. Just because you might not be interested does not mean others aren't.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    I get that, but that doesn't really answer the "why". I also wouldn't buy a fridge that had a built-in toaster.
    - majou 4y ago
      How about a water dispenser and ice machine? Mail and Calendar apps are mostly used from the browser now anwyay.
      - drcongo 4y ago
        Cold water and ice being dispensed from a thing that makes things cold? Makes sense.
    - rickstanley 4y ago
      Your "why" is exactly what selykg answered. To paraphrase: there are some people that would like the convenience to have calendar and e-mail client in their browser, just because it's already there and maybe intersects with the workflow. A niche? Maybe, but there's always someone.
      - drcongo 4y ago
        I guess the thing that's baffling me then is how they got there in the first place.
Raed667 4y ago
It is hard to over-state the impact that MV3 will have on the current extension landscape! This move is a blatant attack from Google on power-users, always in the name of "security" and performance.
- rasz 4y ago
  Google announced that in order to achieve security we must get rid of all "remote code" execution avenues. Really small print: "Remote code" being all code Remote to Google, as in code not residing on Google servers. User code sitting on Users disk in form of an extension installed Locally by the User into his "User Agent" is "Remote code" to Google.
  - svnpenn 4y ago
    > "Remote code" being all code Remote to Google, as in code not residing on Google servers. User code sitting on Users disk in form of an extension installed Locally by the User into his "User Agent" is "Remote code" to Google. Replace Google with Mozilla, and you still have an accurate statement: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647
- hbn 4y ago
  I don't even think you can say adblockers are a "power user" feature. The web is so bloated and bad that it's virtually unusable without it. I hope this gets found as the anti-competitive move that it is. They're taking advantage of their near-monopoly that they have in the browser space to force people to view more of their own ads. It's disgusting.
  - Raed667 4y ago
    Adblocking is the tip of the iceburg. Proxying, dev-tools that manipulate CORS, rule-based cosmetic filters etc... will also be impacted. The other huge change that most people don't know about, is the move from a persistent background.js script to a sevice-worker will just make a number of use-cases impossible or very hacky
hunkins 4y ago
Having built something that had to use the netRequest API due to new extensions being forced into MV3, I can attest to it being viciously limited and complex. Ads will win if MV3 is mass adopted and enforced. Time to set-up Pi-hole.
- arlk 4y ago
  Then Google will start serving ads from a universal domain for all their assets, rendering pi-hole useless. Like they do with YouTube ads.
stevenhubertron 4y ago
I use Vivaldi with NextDNS and LuLu blocking a layer up so between the 3 I get great blocking and love Vivaldi.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  Vivaldi, uBO, Pihole. I feel pretty safe online.
jerrygoyal 4y ago
not just ad blocking, user scripts are going away too. Next year is going to be the year of Firefox. Mozilla team intend to keep these APIs around.
- gorhill 4y ago
  It looks like it's being worked on, see <https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279 https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279>.
londons_explore 4y ago
Google made a faux-pas with this one... Their stated goal is to improve the performance of the web request blocking API. Their (unstated but suspected) goal is to neuter adblocking chrome extensions. They should have made extensions get auto-disabled if they 'slow down web page loading too much'. Set the threshold for that to be say more than a 20% increase in page load time, but make the threshold decrease with time - eg. 10% in 2023, 5% in 2024, 2% in 2025, to finally 1% in 2026 etc. Eventually, that would achieve both of Googles goals - since adblockers would be forced to shorten their lists of regex'es, neutering them, and performance would increase at the same time. Extension developers would have a hard time complaining, because critics will always argue they just have bloated inefficient code.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  > Their (unstated but suspected) goal is to neuter adblocking chrome extensions. Except they didn't. There's already 3-4 adblockers that work perfectly as far as blocking ads is concerned. They do lose more advanced features, but 99.9% of people with adblockers installed never ever touch those features. To claim that this neuters adblocking is truly ridiculous. It also ignores that Safari has the exact same restrictions yet no one complains that Apple wanted to neuter ad blocking.
  - TingPing 4y ago
    This isn't an advanced feature, it's just how to effectively block modern ads and ad networks will just rely on techniques that can't be blocked now.
    - hombre_fatal 4y ago
      Is this speculation or has there actually been an analysis of how many ads are unblockable? I’ve used a declarative ad blocker on iOS for years and haven’t seen ads in a long time, especially not on big websites like Youtube Just sounds like a bunch of speculative hysteria tbh.
      - 4y ago
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
Brave will probably be the only remaining chromium-based browser to have a solid adblock system that's low level enough to not be affected by the manifest changes. Vivaldi is great and all but they suck at privacy. Source: https://privacytests.org https://privacytests.org
- dagurp 4y ago
  https://vivaldi.com/is/security/common-questions/#privacytests https://vivaldi.com/is/security/common-questions/#privacytes...
  - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    This doesn't make sense, Brave and Firefox both fair well on the tests and do not break websites. Vivaldi is not a privacy focused browser so I wouldn't really put it against them but still, both Brave and Firefox do it better: Privacy and Ad-blocking.
    - dagurp 4y ago
      Vivaldi is more privacy focused than any other browser. Brave collects user data [0] and Firefox gives you a unique identifier [1]. The creator of privacytest works for Brave [2] Full disclosure, I work at Vivaldi. 0. https://search.brave.com/help/usage-metrics https://search.brave.com/help/usage-metrics 1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/desktop-attribution-privacy#w_where-can-i-find-more-information-about-the-unique-identifier https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/desktop-attribution-pri... 2. https://privacytests.org/about.html https://privacytests.org/about.html
      - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
        > Vivaldi is more privacy focused than any other browser. Yeah, no. Sorry, You're not even fully FOSS. Brave is the most private mainstream browser. Here's an independent research paper from Trinity College, Dublin about it: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf Brave Researchers are also coming up with great privacy research every month and this isn't just re-inventing the wheel by adding adblocking or things like that. It's real privacy research work with decentralized solutions integrations: https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ > Brave collects user data [0] and Firefox gives you a unique identifier [1 Surprisingly you didn't mention your own policy: "When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message" "Vivaldi includes various links to websites in the browser default bookmarks. Some of those websites are partners of Vivaldi AS and some are not. Vivaldi AS receives shared revenue from those bookmark partners." "On desktop, Vivaldi integrates the Safe browsing API from Google, which checks the site you are visiting against a master list of known suspected phishing and malware sites. This feature can be turned off in the Privacy settings (Settings > Privacy > Privacy)." You don't even proxy these requests to Google, which Brave does, so I'll say your claim about Vivaldi being 'more privacy focused than any other browser' is not true at all. > The creator of privacytest works for Brave I don't see how that makes objective information wrong?
alexvoda 4y ago
Vivaldi really needs its own extension store. What would be even better would be to use the repository model used by linux distros for software distribution. The user should be able to choose which sources of extensions they trust.

133 points by dagurp 4y ago

Glad to hear it. I’ve been using Vivaldi as my main browser for a while now and I’d hate to give it up, but if it’s a choice between Vivaldi and a fully functioning ad blocker I’m probably choosing the latter.

riidom 4y ago
Yes, same for me. On my work laptop I use Firefox, and tried it for a few weeks without adblocker, then I gave up. I'd love to keep Vivaldi, and when there are problems with adblocking, I will give it a patient try to see how bad it actually is, but leaving the chromium world is absolutely an option here. Wonder how Firefox' market share will be influenced by this, in general.
- bloopernova 4y ago
  I'm curious why you used Firefox without ublock origin?

terramex 4y ago

Sure, Vivaldi's AdBlocker might not be impacted a lot, but it does not matter because it is terrible anyway and it triggers every "adblock detection script" I've ever seen. While I like rest of the browser it is unusable without customised uBlock Origin. I was hoping some company would fork Chromium before Manifest V3 change and apply patches from mainline as necessary but it seems less and less likely with every day. If Vivaldi manages to patch out Google's changes and keep uBlock working as it is now they will have me as their user until heat death of the universe.

londons_explore 4y ago
I'm familiar with the Chromium codebase, and maintaining the Manifest web request V2 API wouldn't be a tricky patch to maintain. Even if Google rips it all out and the supporting infrastructure, a full rewrite from scratch wouldn't be too tricky. It's just a bunch of RPC calls to the right extension process from the network stack. You'd still have the downsides that Google is trying to get rid of (extensions can delay requests making the browser slow, and extensions aren't multithreaded so all web requests have to be funnelled through a single javascript thread in the extension). But we've lived with those downsides for 10+ years - I think we can keep them.
- tyingq 4y ago
  >extensions can delay requests making the browser slow There's an older UBO wiki post showing, with their default set of rules, the onBeforeRequest() processing adds about 130ms of latency per request on an older i5 machine. It does also show that a less performance focused ad blocker adds around 420ms. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared/66cc4be09eafa020de8f9a4044ff7ed8e8fc4880 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-ABP:-effic... Of course, then you can subtract whatever performance issues loading all those ads would have caused. That math often ends up in favor of the ad blocker, even if it's not a particularly efficient one.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    0.13 ms per request is loads when you consider a typical web page (facebook homepage) has about 700 requests now, and due to the single-threaded nature of javascript they all need to be processed sequentially. Ie. thats 91 milliseconds seconds of pegging one core, just for one extension, for loading one page. It's also probably an underestimate, because it doesn't include the IPC time within Chrome, which involves at least two context switches, and the associated cache rewarming. Granted, extensions could be better implemented - for example, for URL blocking, there should be a bloom filter for allowing stuff so that the whole list doesn't need to be checked.
  - CodesInChaos 4y ago
    It costs 0.130ms or 130μs, not 130ms.
  - rasz 4y ago
    >onBeforeRequest() processing adds about 130ms of latency per request Sometimes it pays off to do some sanity checks in your head. 130ms is how long it takes for modern CPU to render 50 frames of Overwatch game. Rendering modern FPS is a LOT heavier than looking up URL in a list of 100K rules.

worble 4y ago

>As Vivaldi is built on the Chromium code, how we tackle the API change depends on how Google implements the restriction. The assurance is, whatever restrictions Google adds, in the end, we’ll look into removing them. Is this not a serious wake up call for all these companies relying on Chromium? You are staking so much of your business on a giant conglomerate that does not care about you or your users, whose only aim to sweep up as much data from the web as possible to feed their ad machine.

londons_explore 4y ago
It's not really a wake up call - at any time they could fork and go their own way. Just right now, they prefer to not have to pay for 1000+ engineers to work on the codebase to keep up with the pace that Google manages.
- mort96 4y ago
  I don't think it's a preference thing. I don't think Vivaldi, or Brave, or any other company whose main product is a browser, can have the income to pay 1000+ engineers to work on the codebase to keep up with the pace of Google. Maybe it should at the very least be a wake up call to companies which can't afford the engineer-hours it takes to maintain a Chromium fork.
  - madamelic 4y ago
    There's enough of them and I am sure non-affiliated as well, they could likely scrape together enough engineering 'power' to maintain their own sane fork of Chromium. They don't need to keep pace feature-wise. I don't need a featureful browser, I want a browser that performs well.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      >They don't need to keep pace feature-wise. Last I looked into it; the problem wasnt with features. The Chrome code base is very dynamic and if you fall behind then it becomes very hard to pull upstream patches due to the pace at which things get refactored.

ktosobcy 4y ago

Yeah... relying on Chromium and "don't be evil" Google definitely sounds like fun. It's sad that Firefox engine is so difficult to embed and we could have seen more projects using it.

djbusby 4y ago
Or that Rust based renderer they were working on.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  As far as I'm aware they integrated Servo into Firefox piece by piece.
  - djbusby 4y ago
    I looked. FF >92 is using Quantum Render. It also seems there is a possibility to embed it.
shadowgovt 4y ago
The history of how Chromium got to such a dominant position is basically a history of Mozilla failing to see the next thing over the horizon.
- JohnTHaller 4y ago
  Don't forget all the shady bundleware installers that tricked people into installing Chrome via Adobe Flash, Avast, etc. https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
- gkbrk 4y ago
  Yes, it's due to Mozilla failing to keep up. Possibly Google paying companies to bundle Chrome with their software installers had a part as well. Perhaps putting a Chrome advertisement to the Google homepage and recommending an "upgrade" to all Google visitors played a part too. Maybe.

lemoncookiechip 4y ago

Pretty much every browser that isn't Chrome or Edge, has put out a similar message to Vivaldi's team. If that's not enough for Google to get their **** together, and stop pretending like they're doing this for the good of the end-user, I dunno what is.

drcongo 4y ago

> Vivaldi comes with [...] a built-in Mail and Calendar Why? Why on earth would anyone want those built into their web browser?

selykg 4y ago
Vivaldi is sort of the spiritual successor to Opera and Opera had those things built in and by the sounds of it, some people really enjoyed that. Just because you might not be interested does not mean others aren't.
- drcongo 4y ago
  I get that, but that doesn't really answer the "why". I also wouldn't buy a fridge that had a built-in toaster.
  - majou 4y ago
    How about a water dispenser and ice machine? Mail and Calendar apps are mostly used from the browser now anwyay.
    - drcongo 4y ago
      Cold water and ice being dispensed from a thing that makes things cold? Makes sense.
  - rickstanley 4y ago
    Your "why" is exactly what selykg answered. To paraphrase: there are some people that would like the convenience to have calendar and e-mail client in their browser, just because it's already there and maybe intersects with the workflow. A niche? Maybe, but there's always someone.
    - drcongo 4y ago
      I guess the thing that's baffling me then is how they got there in the first place.

Raed667 4y ago

It is hard to over-state the impact that MV3 will have on the current extension landscape! This move is a blatant attack from Google on power-users, always in the name of "security" and performance.

rasz 4y ago
Google announced that in order to achieve security we must get rid of all "remote code" execution avenues. Really small print: "Remote code" being all code Remote to Google, as in code not residing on Google servers. User code sitting on Users disk in form of an extension installed Locally by the User into his "User Agent" is "Remote code" to Google.
- svnpenn 4y ago
  > "Remote code" being all code Remote to Google, as in code not residing on Google servers. User code sitting on Users disk in form of an extension installed Locally by the User into his "User Agent" is "Remote code" to Google. Replace Google with Mozilla, and you still have an accurate statement: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647
hbn 4y ago
I don't even think you can say adblockers are a "power user" feature. The web is so bloated and bad that it's virtually unusable without it. I hope this gets found as the anti-competitive move that it is. They're taking advantage of their near-monopoly that they have in the browser space to force people to view more of their own ads. It's disgusting.
- Raed667 4y ago
  Adblocking is the tip of the iceburg. Proxying, dev-tools that manipulate CORS, rule-based cosmetic filters etc... will also be impacted. The other huge change that most people don't know about, is the move from a persistent background.js script to a sevice-worker will just make a number of use-cases impossible or very hacky

hunkins 4y ago

Having built something that had to use the netRequest API due to new extensions being forced into MV3, I can attest to it being viciously limited and complex. Ads will win if MV3 is mass adopted and enforced. Time to set-up Pi-hole.

arlk 4y ago
Then Google will start serving ads from a universal domain for all their assets, rendering pi-hole useless. Like they do with YouTube ads.

stevenhubertron 4y ago

I use Vivaldi with NextDNS and LuLu blocking a layer up so between the 3 I get great blocking and love Vivaldi.

unethical_ban 4y ago
Vivaldi, uBO, Pihole. I feel pretty safe online.

jerrygoyal 4y ago

not just ad blocking, user scripts are going away too. Next year is going to be the year of Firefox. Mozilla team intend to keep these APIs around.

gorhill 4y ago
It looks like it's being worked on, see <https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279 https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279>.

londons_explore 4y ago

Google made a faux-pas with this one... Their stated goal is to improve the performance of the web request blocking API. Their (unstated but suspected) goal is to neuter adblocking chrome extensions. They should have made extensions get auto-disabled if they 'slow down web page loading too much'. Set the threshold for that to be say more than a 20% increase in page load time, but make the threshold decrease with time - eg. 10% in 2023, 5% in 2024, 2% in 2025, to finally 1% in 2026 etc. Eventually, that would achieve both of Googles goals - since adblockers would be forced to shorten their lists of regex'es, neutering them, and performance would increase at the same time. Extension developers would have a hard time complaining, because critics will always argue they just have bloated inefficient code.

ehsankia 4y ago
> Their (unstated but suspected) goal is to neuter adblocking chrome extensions. Except they didn't. There's already 3-4 adblockers that work perfectly as far as blocking ads is concerned. They do lose more advanced features, but 99.9% of people with adblockers installed never ever touch those features. To claim that this neuters adblocking is truly ridiculous. It also ignores that Safari has the exact same restrictions yet no one complains that Apple wanted to neuter ad blocking.
- TingPing 4y ago
  This isn't an advanced feature, it's just how to effectively block modern ads and ad networks will just rely on techniques that can't be blocked now.
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    Is this speculation or has there actually been an analysis of how many ads are unblockable? I’ve used a declarative ad blocker on iOS for years and haven’t seen ads in a long time, especially not on big websites like Youtube Just sounds like a bunch of speculative hysteria tbh.
    - 4y ago

NayamAmarshe 4y ago

Brave will probably be the only remaining chromium-based browser to have a solid adblock system that's low level enough to not be affected by the manifest changes. Vivaldi is great and all but they suck at privacy. Source: https://privacytests.org https://privacytests.org

dagurp 4y ago
https://vivaldi.com/is/security/common-questions/#privacytests https://vivaldi.com/is/security/common-questions/#privacytes...
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  This doesn't make sense, Brave and Firefox both fair well on the tests and do not break websites. Vivaldi is not a privacy focused browser so I wouldn't really put it against them but still, both Brave and Firefox do it better: Privacy and Ad-blocking.
  - dagurp 4y ago
    Vivaldi is more privacy focused than any other browser. Brave collects user data [0] and Firefox gives you a unique identifier [1]. The creator of privacytest works for Brave [2] Full disclosure, I work at Vivaldi. 0. https://search.brave.com/help/usage-metrics https://search.brave.com/help/usage-metrics 1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/desktop-attribution-privacy#w_where-can-i-find-more-information-about-the-unique-identifier https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/desktop-attribution-pri... 2. https://privacytests.org/about.html https://privacytests.org/about.html
    - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
      > Vivaldi is more privacy focused than any other browser. Yeah, no. Sorry, You're not even fully FOSS. Brave is the most private mainstream browser. Here's an independent research paper from Trinity College, Dublin about it: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf Brave Researchers are also coming up with great privacy research every month and this isn't just re-inventing the wheel by adding adblocking or things like that. It's real privacy research work with decentralized solutions integrations: https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ > Brave collects user data [0] and Firefox gives you a unique identifier [1 Surprisingly you didn't mention your own policy: "When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message" "Vivaldi includes various links to websites in the browser default bookmarks. Some of those websites are partners of Vivaldi AS and some are not. Vivaldi AS receives shared revenue from those bookmark partners." "On desktop, Vivaldi integrates the Safe browsing API from Google, which checks the site you are visiting against a master list of known suspected phishing and malware sites. This feature can be turned off in the Privacy settings (Settings > Privacy > Privacy)." You don't even proxy these requests to Google, which Brave does, so I'll say your claim about Vivaldi being 'more privacy focused than any other browser' is not true at all. > The creator of privacytest works for Brave I don't see how that makes objective information wrong?

alexvoda 4y ago

Vivaldi really needs its own extension store. What would be even better would be to use the repository model used by linux distros for software distribution. The user should be able to choose which sources of extensions they trust.