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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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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/