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by vovavili 1 day ago
>I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else

Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.

3 comments

I thought that brave was caught injecting affiliate links. That alone makes it worse than anything mozilla has done.

Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_...

ill be in the strong minority here, and it should be opt-in, but if theres no affiliate link, i would be ok with my tiny marketshare browser capturing the extra. less ethical for them to be replacing other peoples affiliate links, but they are also blocking ads ... so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.
I would much rather just pay the browser maker directly rather than it subtly doing strange things without letting me know.

> so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.

Ads are hardly an example of an ethical product to begin with, hah.

two wrongs?
What I don't understand is how inserting affiliate links doesn't violate affiliate ToS.
"Direct match" can be disabled

It's URL prefixing

Vivaldi claims they don't collect data from "Direct Match"

No way to verify this claim is true but that's beside the point. It's another web browser sending traffic to it's own servers

Vivaldi is Chromium-based

This week an "I'm quitting" blog post from a former Mozilla employee was on the HN front page. He more or less recommended Vivaldi, i.e., Chromium

The problem of advertising is not solved by choice of browser vendor where _all_ the vendors are trying to make money from ad services, partnerships with Google, affiliate marketing, cryptocurrency, etc.

"Not as bad as Chrome" is a pathetically low bar to meet

These browsers take longer to compile than an operating system. Absurd complexity and vulnerability

The Vivaldi default settings are just as bad as any other so-called "modern" browser, i.e., they have to be changed

It's a fool's errand to compare these browsers to each other. They have far more similarities than differences. They all suck

They're built on Chromium, they still reinforce the Chromium monoculture and expand Google's influence.
Those 2 browsers used a rendering engine developed by Google. It would not be wrong to consider them partial chromium reskins with all the technical dependency it entails.