[yard2010]

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.

[AegirLeet]

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.

[_verandaguy]

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]

Firefox is controlled opposition practically owned by Google. Follow the money.

Ladybird seems to be the only hope, once available.

[buran77]

> 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?

[dylan604]

> 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?

A million individual voices are just noise which is what your "fellow paying customers" line equates. A single monetary contributor is not that. It is the sugar daddy of Firefox. Conflating the two seems to be a bad faith comparison.

[buran77]

> It is the sugar daddy of Firefox.

Talking about bad faith, with Google's single, enormously powerful voice surely you can hear what it says. So why not answer to literally the first thing I asked in my comment instead of skipping straight to the end to claim bad faith? You should have laundry list of examples to show how Google flashes the cash and the orders, and Firefox executes. That's a sugar daddy.

You understand that if Firefox ever just becomes a puppet on Google hand the whole setup crumbles? It's barely at the edge of plausible deniability even today. Why kill the golden goose when Firefox is anyway in no position to become a real threat on the browser market any time soon.

Plenty of companies lived and died by their customers' "noise", or at least got a bloody nose, so that's a shallow dismissal.

[andai]

I heard Mozilla described as "Google's antitrust lawsuit insurance."

That doesn't really seem relevant these days though. Although I guess duopolies are totally fine.

[realusername]

In the US for sure but in the EU, that insurance is still relevant.

[Petersipoi]

What is the advantage of building a browser engine from scratch? As opposed to just forking Blink and maintaining it as a separate project? Seems like the former just adds an ungodly amount of work and still doesn't solve the problem of Google using its weight to control web standards.

If Firefox and Apple can't rein in Google with their competing engines, what exactly does Ladybird change?

[kermatt]

> What is the advantage of building a browser engine from scratch?

Same reason some of us choose Linux over Windows.

[Petersipoi]

Linux and Windows do not have a goal of perfectly emulating the other one, to the degree of sharing the same spec and tests. Not sure how this example applies, especially since Blink is open source, while Windows is not.

In fact your example betrays you, because it would be like rewriting Linux from scratch while still attempting to maintain perfect compatibly with Linux. And then arguing that you've somehow weakened Linux in the process. Why not just fork it and maintain your own fork?

[swed420]

> What is the advantage of building a browser engine from scratch?

Straight from the source:

https://ladybird.org/posts/why-ladybird/

[nwienert]

Apple does rein them in heavily, they push back on specs all the time, somewhat effectively.

[NoGravitas]

Vivaldi is almost certainly the best Blink browser, and I'd certainly use it if only Blink browsers were viable. As long as that's not the case, I am, like you, using something based on Firefox; in my case, Zen.

[arikrahman]

This is why I use Zen. All the benefits of Vivaldi, with the peace of mind supporting a Mozilla stack.

[tapoxi]

I love Zen but it doesn't support TouchID passkey auth on macOS. I'm someone who needs to Okta with multiple times a day, and this drove me to use Vivaldi instead.

[arikrahman]

Ah that seems like a use case where Zen falls short. I hope there comes a solution to this someday but the proprietary nature of it seems prohibitive. If Asahi Linux can figure out TouchID then maybe there might be a way.

[tapoxi]

This has been a lost cause for the past decade or so. Web developers don't target Firefox anymore because a 5% share isn't enough to matter.

Both projects (Chromium and Firefox) are open, so it's like Linux vs FreeBSD, but at least FreeBSD has a clear licensing advantage.

[Barbing]

We need some billionaire class people to take their business from a site that won’t support Firefox, and say why. or whatever that’s less pie in sky

No defeatism though please, some of us will advocate till the end (pen & paper)

[DavideNL]

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)

[calvinmorrison]

Blink is a virtual machine. It's like complaining about the Hegemony of Perl

[notachatbot123]

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-v...

How are integrated ads and dispatch of user data to third-parties sustainable sources of income?

[abrowne]

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

[saghm]

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.

[satvikpendem]

It's Chromium so I'll continue using Firefox

[nanook]

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_s... https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all...

[xigoi]

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

[princevegeta89]

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

[tuananh]

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

[zb3]

Furthermore I don't see a clear business model there that isn't about injecting ads.

[tredre3]

They have affiliate bookmarks and as well as links that are injected when you type things in the address bar.

They don't append their affiliate code when you type the full url (like brave did that one time) at least but I feel like adding undisclosed sponsored suggestions to the autocomplete counts as "injecting".

[WolfeReader]

Vivaldi has been doing exactly this for years now

[dismalaf]

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]

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]

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]

> 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.

[dismalaf]

> want to be able to analyze and modify

You literally can if you want, it's just JavaScript and CSS, you just can't redistribute it as your own.

[m-axiom]

Good thing then, that you can download sources from: https://vivaldi.com/source/

[nulld3v]

That's not the full source code of the browser, that only includes the core engine. The UI is still closed source.

[ktm5j]

Can I ask why?

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

For me, it's a privacy concern. Closed source means only one company is fixing vulnerabilities, whereas open source invites security researchers to find and fix issues quicker. Fewer security gaps == less privacy risk.

[ktm5j]

I've heard that argument before, but has that actually been demonstrated? Ability to look at the code (especially in the age of AI) means that security researchers aren't the only ones who can look for bugs. For example, look at the bugs like copyfail that AI has recently uncovered in the Linux kernel.

[thesuitonym]

If an AI can find a vulnerability for a hacker, it will also find that vulnerability for a security researcher, so that point is moot.

There exists a danger that very good hackers will be able to find vulnerabilities by looking through the source code, but very good hackers find vulnerabilities without source code anyway.

Consider the following: Would you rather walk down a busy street hundreds of other people walking by, including police officers, good samaritans, and maybe people who want to do you harm, or would you rather walk down a dark ally with only four people in it?

[colordrops]

You are grasping for straws. No one said open source is perfect. But it's just an obvious fact that open source is going to be easier to audit than closed source.

[ktm5j]

No, I'm asking questions...... not pretending I have answers.

[beepbooptheory]

But isn't that their point? In the age of AI, maybe being "easier to audit" is as much a risk than an assurance? I'm not sure I agree, but it is interesting to mull over. Further, either way, your tone and response is not very charitable, to say the least. From the outside, you are the only one blustering and grasping here. Not everything needs to be so antagonistic maybe?

[ktm5j]

Okay guys, I'm being downvoted for asking questions? Let's be real, OSS has not been proven to be more secure. If you think otherwise then please back it up, I'm okay with being proven wrong.

[uwagar]

like dude. do u have to?

[ktm5j]

Great answer ..

[Imustaskforhelp]

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!

[Saris]

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.

[kurtis_reed]

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

[andai]

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.

[brnt]

> 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!)?

[colordrops]

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

[m-axiom]

Have you tried to google "vivaldi source"? You might be suprised

[colordrops]

Yes, have you? It's not open source. Not sure what your point is.

[andrewla]

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.

[spinningarrow]

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]

Sounds like a you problem. It never crashes on me.

[rfrey]

What would that "you problem" look like? Bought the wrong laptop? Bad aura? Clicking links wrong?

[spinningarrow]

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]

I run on multiple machines without issue.

[sunrunner]

Really upping the stakes of "It works on my machine" with an escalation to "It works on multiple of my machines".

[antiframe]

What an uncharitable take. Does the fact that the browser crashes on their machine offend you in some way?

[sys_64738]

Quite a bizarre response but whatever.

[slig]

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

[kavok]

I’m pretty sure Brave and Vivaldi are both based on Chromium/Blink not WebKit.

[slig]

Thanks, that's what I get for commenting before the coffee kicks in.

[dncornholio]

aids and cancer, seriously?