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Replacement for Firefox?
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this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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The only Chromium I know which isn't an insult to privacy is Vivaldi
Vivaldi is an ungoogled Chromium, there don't go any data to Google, except if you use the optional Google Save Search in the privacy settings. OpenSource, well, Vivaldi isn't strict OpenSource, because 5% of the script corresponding to the UI is proprietary, but full auditable and even accessible and moddeable by the user, in the forum they show how to do it (logically at own risk). There isn't any privacy issue or hidden things in it. User data in a Mozilla-Firefox Account is shared with Alphabet, googleanalytics and google-tagmanager, in Vivaldi nothing is shared with Google or other companies.
You need an account if you use sync and don't want third party or self hosted solutions. I don't think that there is nothing vague or fishy in Vivaldi, it's all very transparent. Chromium (Blink) is used by the vast majory of browsers in the web and Vivaldy, apart of beeing the only EU browser is a very small cooperative in Norway. What do you think ocurres if Vivaldi release its nique UI as OpenSource, which compañies in less a second will use it for the own browser? Chrome and EDGE and killing with this definitively the competence and a free internet, include Vivaldi.
Google dominate the internet and battle against Vivaldi and others, or buy them, like Mozilla, since several years, first with discriminatory browsersniffing, blocking the access of several sites if it detected Vivaldi in the UA. Because of this, Vivaldi was disguised by the devs as Chrome against the own interests, later introducing several tracking APIs in the Chromium base, which the Vivaldi devs stripped out (except security updates) since years, before using it for Vivaldi (Because of this the Chromium base in Vivaldi is somewhat behind (~< a month) the official Chromium version. Later Google tried it with webpage APIs (FloC, idle API and others) also skipped by V devs. Mv3 also not affect Vivaldi with the inbuild blockers, no need to have the daily battle which Gorhill has to maintan uBO up to date. For YT I've enough with the Vivaldi trackerblocker and a userscript, to have YT 100% free of ads and nags since more than 8 month.
I have been using Vivaldi for 8 years and I have seen all of Google's tricks to eliminate Vivaldi as an uncomfortable competition, especially due to von Tetzchner's activism against Google's practices and web surveillance, which together with others and the Norwegian organization of consumers has driven this GDPR in the EU.
As a user I don't care about these 5% UI proprietary scripts, but I do care about the ethics and transparency of the company with the user and this is beyond any doubt
etc.
You can't buy trust with OpenSource, the trust must be gained by the author
vs
Do you trust OpenSource made by Facebook, MS or Google? Vivaldi don't, because of this use a lot of work to gut the Chromium code (100% FOSS) before using it. For an user it's irrelevant if part of the UI is proprietary, knowing that the script is clean of any hidden things. Anyone with knowledge of programming can check it and even modify it without problem, the only limitation: it cannot be used by other browsers or companies. Any advanced browser has parts which are not fully OpenSource because of a amount of very different licenses from the scripts of the different features which a browser offer, also Firefox , eg the translation tool of FF, which is from Lingvanex, the same as hosted by Vivaldi, which is proprietary soft. Maybe the definition of OpenSource need an update, currently it's a pretty grayzone.
For the rest https://vivaldi.com/source/
How is the ad blocker? I use Brave at work for debugging frontend code, but I don't really trust the org behind it. But I need something in the Chromium family to test our app, and the ad blocker is nice (main browser is Firefox).
If Vivaldi's ad blocker is as good as Brave's, I'll switch. I'll probably keep Chromium on my personal computers though (all Linux) because Vivaldi isn't open source. I use it very rarely since Firefox meets my needs, so it's less of an issue.
I use no other, the ad/trackerblocker in Vivaldi is full customizable, you can add the filterlists you want. In the adblock test I got between 90-100% (You must test the best filter combination, because too much can break some sites, adblocking is always a balance game). If you want more privacy, you can use the privacy extensions you want or use userscripts, which you can install directly as extension, if you don't want to use Tamper-,Greasy- or Violentmonkey to do this. It's a EU company (strict GDPR), no tracking, ads or third parties behind, own sync server e2ee.
Cool, I'm playing with it. One concern is that it's closed source.
I'm not going to use it as a main browser most likely though, I'm happy with Firefox, but I need something for when websites refuse to work w/ it.
Besides, you can always just throw uBlock on it and be done with the adblock stuff
Its always good to have several browsers at hand. The perfect browser is the one which fits the needs of the user.
Eh, several seems like a bit much, but diversity in general is good. I use Firefox because it solves my needs, but I need a Chromium-based browser for random broken sites.
Instead of FF I¡ve also Mullvad, apart Otter and SSuite Netsurf. so I've 4 different engines at hand, if needed. Blink, Gecko, Qt5 and WebView.