[ahofmann]

Vivaldi is the browser, where I always wonder why it doesn't get mentioned in all the privacy enhanced browsers. It's the only browser for me, that reliably filters out all ads with ublock origin while working on all websites without any problems. Also the company behind Vivaldi is not in USA/China/Russia, which also helps from my point of view.

[turblety]

Because it's a proprietary closed source fork of Google Chromium. There's nothing to trust. If it's free and closed source, you are the product.

[isodev]

> you are the product

Then we need to have a discussion about that because in case of Vivaldi you are in fact not the product.

[turblety]

Happy to discuss.

I'm not sure if this [1] is still relevant, but it appears that Vivaldi makes money by promoting search engines and bookmarks to their users via their closed source, secret, Chromium fork.

If my usage of their Chromium clone is being used to sell search engines/website bookmarks, then I am indeed the product.

There does also seem to be a VPN option on their site that I'm assuming I can pay for, which seems it could be an actually buyable product rather than selling my usage of their browser.

1. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

[gmueckl]

"Being the product" refers to recording user behavior and processing it for gains. Displaying non-personalized ads (which are trivial to completely avoid in Vivaldi) is not that.

[turblety]

That's not really what "being the product" is commonly recognised as.

Vivaldi go out to their customers (that's not you) and say "We have 1000 suckers who have downloaded and use our closed source, Chromium cloned, browser. We can serve your website as a bookmark to them, or add you to their search engine list if you give us $x."

Since you are not their "customer" (that's the people paying them to appear in your settings) what are you? You are the "product", you are what Vivaldi is selling.

[gmueckl]

That's actually NOT what this phrase implies. It is really about targeted ads and the drive for more ads and more precise targeting based on user data. Look up attention economy.

Vivaldi is not that. The only place where it shows anything remotely like ads is its default start page with prepopulated links and that can be hidden by flipping a single setting. I haven't seen this page for at least a couple of months now o my Vivaldi instances.

[antiframe]

You have a different definition of "being the product" than I do. A business that takes money from advertisers in exchange for your attention is selling your attention. You are the product is shorthand for your attention is the product, short of slavery.

[gmueckl]

But in order to fit the phrase the business has to actively fight for user attention to get the space for ads. This is specifically the search engine and social media model. Vivaldi is not fighting this fight. At all.

[gilrain]

> in case of Vivaldi you are in fact not the product

I’m really curious what gave you this impression. Vivaldi doesn’t hide its business model, yet you were so confident!

[gib444]

Privacy enhanced? lol. Install the Android version (similar to desktop I imagine):

- The choice in the wizard defaults to no blocking of ads and trackers

- Third Party cookies enabled by default

- WebRTC IP leaking is the default

- No option not to persist history/permanent incognito mode

Etc

I imagine it leaks your list of extensions just like chromium too

[tredre3]

> - No option not to persist history/permanent incognito mode

That's something I've always wanted.

Only Firefox seems to offer it. Firefox can also open external links in incognito (eg if you tap a link in another app, it will open in a firefox private window)

Duckduckgo browser and Brave can be set to delete all data upon start, which is similar but not quite the same because things are still persisted until they're cleaned up at the next start (they say it happens on exit but it really happens on start, because catching exit isn't reliable or something).

Brave also has no way to have exceptions for certain websites (Duckduckgo can, they call it fireproofing).

[gib444]

> Only Firefox seems to offer it

Ohh I didn't realise Firefox persisted the toggle to Private mode on Android! (Properly, even if you Force Quit). I was using Brave previously, which doesn't do that, so assumed the same.

Though it says "Firefox deletes your cookies, history and site data when you close all your private tabs" ... so I'm not exactly sure what gets persisted and what persisted gets deleted when