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Guys use Vivaldi. It's a present. A browser that has a sustainable business model and interests that reconcile with the user interests - consume the web as god

by yard2010 5mo ago

Guys use Vivaldi. It's a present. A browser that has a sustainable business model and interests that reconcile with the user interests - consume the web as god intended, with no literally aids and cancer ads out of the box. I switched a while ago from Firefox and while the UI is.. different, it's been a great experience. In my opinion this project and the great people behind it must be the leaders of this industry, and not the current crooked and twisted hegemony we have now. I'm not affiliated. Happy user.

xigoi 5mo ago
Vivaldi for Android does not support extensions, making it a non-starter for me.
- princevegeta89 5mo ago
  The only browser that supports them on Android is Firefox - but Brave is my main browser and I can't seem to move away from it
notachatbot123 5mo ago
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ lists - Partner deals with search engines - Partner deals with bookmark partners - Partner deals through Direct Match - https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-vpn-is-now-built-into-vivaldi/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-v... How are integrated ads and dispatch of user data to third-parties sustainable sources of income?
- abrowne 5mo ago
  Sustainable means those sources of income will continue, not that they are positive for users.
tuananh 5mo ago
a closed-source browser is a non-starter for me.
- dismalaf 5mo ago
  https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser... It's open in all of the ways that matter, basically they just want to protect their look and feel.
  - wasting_time 5mo ago
    Some of their arguments are ridiculous. > A new project based on our code might implement features that are fundamentally in opposition to our ethics (e.g., damaging to privacy, human rights or to the environment). Even though we would not be associated with the project in any way, it can deeply affect how people see Vivaldi (and how we see ourselves), damaging a reputation we have taken pains to earn. > You can’t test drive open-source and then close everything back off if it turns out that open-source isn’t working out. At the same time they express regret that the Presto engine from their Opera roots didn't get open-sourced. Which was much more novel than just a Chromium re-skin. The entire article can be summarized as "we worry that others might make a better product off our code" and "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community". No thank you.
    - dismalaf 5mo ago
      Are you reading the same article? > "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community". Lol literally all the code is visible. Also all the Firefox forks I've seen are low-effort forks that even piggyback off Mozilla's servers for stuff like user authentication.
  - tredre3 5mo ago
    > It's open in all of the ways that matter I disagree greatly here. I'd argue that the engine is the part that matters the least to users, it's the added UI/UX they want to be able to analyze and modify. Blink won't send my bookmarks and passwords unencrypted to god knows where. The vivaldi UI might. I'd want to see the source for their system. Blink also doesn't have a built-in VPN or remotely togglable experiment system that I'd like to analyze, that's in the closed source part of Vivaldi. If I want to add features that aren't possible through webextensions, chances are that I need to modify the UI, not the engine, to make it happen. If I'm a purist, of course I want it all open.
AegirLeet 5mo ago
The real hegemony is the Blink hegemony. Google (an advertising company) can pretty much unilaterally dictate web standards. A terrible state of affairs for the web. That's the real issue and using another Chrome reskin is never going to fix it.
- DavideNL 5mo ago
  For those wondering...: "Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the free and open-source Chromium project. Blink is by far the most-used browser engine, due to the market share dominance of Google Chrome and the fact that many other browsers are based on the Chromium code." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
- _verandaguy 5mo ago
  This is the main reason I stay away from Vivaldi; using Firefox is, for all of Mozilla's borderline comical mismanagement, a protest vote against Blink (and previously, Chromium).
  - swed420 5mo ago
    Firefox is controlled opposition practically owned by Google. Follow the money. Ladybird seems to be the only hope, once available.
    - buran77 5mo ago
      > Firefox is controlled opposition practically owned by Google And how does that "ownership" look like in practice? Has Google ever decided how things should be done "or else"? What Google does is pay a protection tax. Without Firefox around and independent, the EU is almost sure to break Chrome away from Google, especially with the warm EU-US relations now. So Google pays and is going to pay as much as it takes to keep Firefox alive, kicking, and doing whatever it wants. Google Chrome needs Firefox to be moderately successful more than Firefox needs that money. Or else it might become someone else's Chrome. > Follow the money Everyone has this revelation once. If it was that easy then customers would practically own the company providing them the services. Do you and your fellow paying customers feel like you own any company, especially big-tech? Do you all control Netflix? Amazon? Apple?
spinningarrow 5mo ago
I actively used Vivaldi for several months until recently - on my Mac it would intermittently crash for no reason I could find. I’ve since switched to ungoogled-chromium - it’s only a couple of weeks so it’s early days but so far it’s been very stable.
- sys_64738 5mo ago
  Sounds like a you problem. It never crashes on me.
  - spinningarrow 5mo ago
    I’ll try to take your comment in good faith. And of course - that’s the trouble with issues like these isn’t it? I did find some reports online of the same but when there’s no consistent way of making it happen, there’s no simple solution either. I ran it with no extensions and out of the other chromium-based browsers I’ve tried it’s the only one where I’ve had crash issues.
    - sys_64738 5mo ago
      I run on multiple machines without issue.
      - sunrunner 5mo ago
        Really upping the stakes of "It works on my machine" with an escalation to "It works on multiple of my machines".
  - antiframe 5mo ago
    What an uncharitable take. Does the fact that the browser crashes on their machine offend you in some way?
    - sys_64738 5mo ago
      Quite a bizarre response but whatever.
dncornholio 5mo ago
aids and cancer, seriously?
slig 5mo ago
Closed source and based on Webkit? At least Brave is open source.
- kavok 5mo ago
  I’m pretty sure Brave and Vivaldi are both based on Chromium/Blink not WebKit.
  - slig 5mo ago
    Thanks, that's what I get for commenting before the coffee kicks in.
nanook 5mo ago
reposting here since I feel like this is a big deal and under reported. beware, their sync will go down for weeks and you may lose all your data. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_sync_down_11_days_and_counting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_s... https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all_my_sync_data_is_gone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all...
brnt 5mo ago
> interests that reconcile with the user interests How are you paying them? And have you done any network analysis on it recently (I really would like to know!)?
satvikpendem 5mo ago
It's Chromium so I'll continue using Firefox
kurtis_reed 5mo ago
I tried Vivaldi a couple of years ago and it was slow as fuck
- andai 5mo ago
  The UI was written in Javascript I believe. At least a few years ago when I tried it. I was pretty happy with it except for the lag which made it unusable on my hardware. It is very much in the spirit of the old Opera browser. I miss the days when software was trying to be as cool as possible instead of trying to be as lame as possible. (God what a concept!) It's good to see someone still trying.
Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
I hope you try out zen browser as well, It is really customizable and with Ublock origin installed, It becomes one of the best browsers. And it is built on firefox's web engine itself which imo is an added benefit compared to blink on which vivaldi is from, @AegirLeet's comments about Blink hegemoney is true but also there shouldn't necessarily just be one web browser engine imo and that too created by google (blink), one can criticize mozilla/firefox and that is true but you aren't limited to firefox, there are zen browser, floorp, librewolf etc. I highly recommend you to test zen-browser if you haven't already!
saghm 5mo ago
I still can't really get behind the idea of a closed-source browser. Market dynamics aside, Chromium is at least open source (and if anything, most of the stuff that's bundled into the version of it that makes Chrome isn't particularly desirable to me anyhow). Firefox is not nearly bad enough for me to want to swap to a browser where the business model is the selling point.
colordrops 5mo ago
Nope, I don't use closed source browsers. Hell no.
- m-axiom 5mo ago
  Have you tried to google "vivaldi source"? You might be suprised
  - colordrops 5mo ago
    Yes, have you? It's not open source. Not sure what your point is.
Saris 5mo ago
It's closed source and chromium based, it's also really ugly looking IMO. The Android version also doesn't support addons so that's a huge fail. I'll stick with Zen.
andrewla 5mo ago
I may be a bit unorthodox here but to me the user interest is in minimizing the amount that it attempts to modify the web. Ad blocking is frankly not something I want my browser to do. I want it to make it hard to advertise -- things like forbidding third party cookies, preventing browser fingerprinting, allowing text selection always, supporting dev tools and inspection, etc. Basically trying to respect the fact that it is a user agent and not a "server agent". This means killing off features like integrated sign-in and probably search result pre-fetching. The reality is that if you are using ad blocking, you are free-riding off of users who are not using them. It's an illusion to believe that "ad blocking" can actually work. If "ad blockers" were universal, then sites would just work around it -- instead of serving from third-party domains they would use plugins to serve on the first-party page. This will make everything slower and more heavyweight. Right now it's just not worth doing it.

xigoi 5mo ago

Vivaldi for Android does not support extensions, making it a non-starter for me.

princevegeta89 5mo ago
The only browser that supports them on Android is Firefox - but Brave is my main browser and I can't seem to move away from it

notachatbot123 5mo ago

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ lists - Partner deals with search engines - Partner deals with bookmark partners - Partner deals through Direct Match - https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-vpn-is-now-built-into-vivaldi/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-v... How are integrated ads and dispatch of user data to third-parties sustainable sources of income?

abrowne 5mo ago
Sustainable means those sources of income will continue, not that they are positive for users.

tuananh 5mo ago

a closed-source browser is a non-starter for me.

dismalaf 5mo ago
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser... It's open in all of the ways that matter, basically they just want to protect their look and feel.
- wasting_time 5mo ago
  Some of their arguments are ridiculous. > A new project based on our code might implement features that are fundamentally in opposition to our ethics (e.g., damaging to privacy, human rights or to the environment). Even though we would not be associated with the project in any way, it can deeply affect how people see Vivaldi (and how we see ourselves), damaging a reputation we have taken pains to earn. > You can’t test drive open-source and then close everything back off if it turns out that open-source isn’t working out. At the same time they express regret that the Presto engine from their Opera roots didn't get open-sourced. Which was much more novel than just a Chromium re-skin. The entire article can be summarized as "we worry that others might make a better product off our code" and "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community". No thank you.
  - dismalaf 5mo ago
    Are you reading the same article? > "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community". Lol literally all the code is visible. Also all the Firefox forks I've seen are low-effort forks that even piggyback off Mozilla's servers for stuff like user authentication.
- tredre3 5mo ago
  > It's open in all of the ways that matter I disagree greatly here. I'd argue that the engine is the part that matters the least to users, it's the added UI/UX they want to be able to analyze and modify. Blink won't send my bookmarks and passwords unencrypted to god knows where. The vivaldi UI might. I'd want to see the source for their system. Blink also doesn't have a built-in VPN or remotely togglable experiment system that I'd like to analyze, that's in the closed source part of Vivaldi. If I want to add features that aren't possible through webextensions, chances are that I need to modify the UI, not the engine, to make it happen. If I'm a purist, of course I want it all open.

AegirLeet 5mo ago

The real hegemony is the Blink hegemony. Google (an advertising company) can pretty much unilaterally dictate web standards. A terrible state of affairs for the web. That's the real issue and using another Chrome reskin is never going to fix it.

DavideNL 5mo ago
For those wondering...: "Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the free and open-source Chromium project. Blink is by far the most-used browser engine, due to the market share dominance of Google Chrome and the fact that many other browsers are based on the Chromium code." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
_verandaguy 5mo ago
This is the main reason I stay away from Vivaldi; using Firefox is, for all of Mozilla's borderline comical mismanagement, a protest vote against Blink (and previously, Chromium).
- swed420 5mo ago
  Firefox is controlled opposition practically owned by Google. Follow the money. Ladybird seems to be the only hope, once available.
  - buran77 5mo ago
    > Firefox is controlled opposition practically owned by Google And how does that "ownership" look like in practice? Has Google ever decided how things should be done "or else"? What Google does is pay a protection tax. Without Firefox around and independent, the EU is almost sure to break Chrome away from Google, especially with the warm EU-US relations now. So Google pays and is going to pay as much as it takes to keep Firefox alive, kicking, and doing whatever it wants. Google Chrome needs Firefox to be moderately successful more than Firefox needs that money. Or else it might become someone else's Chrome. > Follow the money Everyone has this revelation once. If it was that easy then customers would practically own the company providing them the services. Do you and your fellow paying customers feel like you own any company, especially big-tech? Do you all control Netflix? Amazon? Apple?

spinningarrow 5mo ago

I actively used Vivaldi for several months until recently - on my Mac it would intermittently crash for no reason I could find. I’ve since switched to ungoogled-chromium - it’s only a couple of weeks so it’s early days but so far it’s been very stable.

sys_64738 5mo ago
Sounds like a you problem. It never crashes on me.
- spinningarrow 5mo ago
  I’ll try to take your comment in good faith. And of course - that’s the trouble with issues like these isn’t it? I did find some reports online of the same but when there’s no consistent way of making it happen, there’s no simple solution either. I ran it with no extensions and out of the other chromium-based browsers I’ve tried it’s the only one where I’ve had crash issues.
  - sys_64738 5mo ago
    I run on multiple machines without issue.
    - sunrunner 5mo ago
      Really upping the stakes of "It works on my machine" with an escalation to "It works on multiple of my machines".
- antiframe 5mo ago
  What an uncharitable take. Does the fact that the browser crashes on their machine offend you in some way?
  - sys_64738 5mo ago
    Quite a bizarre response but whatever.

dncornholio 5mo ago

aids and cancer, seriously?

slig 5mo ago

Closed source and based on Webkit? At least Brave is open source.

kavok 5mo ago
I’m pretty sure Brave and Vivaldi are both based on Chromium/Blink not WebKit.
- slig 5mo ago
  Thanks, that's what I get for commenting before the coffee kicks in.

nanook 5mo ago

reposting here since I feel like this is a big deal and under reported. beware, their sync will go down for weeks and you may lose all your data. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_sync_down_11_days_and_counting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_s... https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all_my_sync_data_is_gone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all...

brnt 5mo ago

> interests that reconcile with the user interests How are you paying them? And have you done any network analysis on it recently (I really would like to know!)?

satvikpendem 5mo ago

It's Chromium so I'll continue using Firefox

kurtis_reed 5mo ago

I tried Vivaldi a couple of years ago and it was slow as fuck

andai 5mo ago
The UI was written in Javascript I believe. At least a few years ago when I tried it. I was pretty happy with it except for the lag which made it unusable on my hardware. It is very much in the spirit of the old Opera browser. I miss the days when software was trying to be as cool as possible instead of trying to be as lame as possible. (God what a concept!) It's good to see someone still trying.

Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago

I hope you try out zen browser as well, It is really customizable and with Ublock origin installed, It becomes one of the best browsers. And it is built on firefox's web engine itself which imo is an added benefit compared to blink on which vivaldi is from, @AegirLeet's comments about Blink hegemoney is true but also there shouldn't necessarily just be one web browser engine imo and that too created by google (blink), one can criticize mozilla/firefox and that is true but you aren't limited to firefox, there are zen browser, floorp, librewolf etc. I highly recommend you to test zen-browser if you haven't already!

saghm 5mo ago

I still can't really get behind the idea of a closed-source browser. Market dynamics aside, Chromium is at least open source (and if anything, most of the stuff that's bundled into the version of it that makes Chrome isn't particularly desirable to me anyhow). Firefox is not nearly bad enough for me to want to swap to a browser where the business model is the selling point.

colordrops 5mo ago

Nope, I don't use closed source browsers. Hell no.

m-axiom 5mo ago
Have you tried to google "vivaldi source"? You might be suprised
- colordrops 5mo ago
  Yes, have you? It's not open source. Not sure what your point is.

Saris 5mo ago

It's closed source and chromium based, it's also really ugly looking IMO. The Android version also doesn't support addons so that's a huge fail. I'll stick with Zen.

andrewla 5mo ago

I may be a bit unorthodox here but to me the user interest is in minimizing the amount that it attempts to modify the web. Ad blocking is frankly not something I want my browser to do. I want it to make it hard to advertise -- things like forbidding third party cookies, preventing browser fingerprinting, allowing text selection always, supporting dev tools and inspection, etc. Basically trying to respect the fact that it is a user agent and not a "server agent". This means killing off features like integrated sign-in and probably search result pre-fetching. The reality is that if you are using ad blocking, you are free-riding off of users who are not using them. It's an illusion to believe that "ad blocking" can actually work. If "ad blockers" were universal, then sites would just work around it -- instead of serving from third-party domains they would use plugins to serve on the first-party page. This will make everything slower and more heavyweight. Right now it's just not worth doing it.