I daily drive Firefox, but more and more websites are starting to break without Chromium, so I still have to occasionally switch to get something working. I was using Ungoogled Chromium until I realized that there was no easy way to update it when that pixel-stealing exploit came out a while back.
To be clear, I’m not talking about stock “no settings changed” Vivaldi. With that requirement, even Firefox could be called invasive! What I want to know is if Vivaldi is relatively safe to use with all the telemetry and stuff disabled in the settings and using any necessary extensions.
Thanks!
If it doesn’t load in Firefox, it isn’t worth loading. That’s my stance i won’t budge, i need no website enough to use chrome ever again.
Amen. I can remember the “this site is best viewed on Internet Explorer” badges. Let’s not go down that route again.
I have zero issues with FF, apart from Teams but fortunately I rarely have to use that shitty app.
I use Vivaldi alongside Firefox. And yes, Vivaldi is great. It has a really really nice tab management system which I really wish was on Firefox. Otherwise it’s very fast and very customisable. I recommend to at least give it a solid try.
Although not OpenSource it is Source Available: https://vivaldi.com/source/
not even source available, if I understand it correctly, that code does not contain essential UI features, which mean that you couldn’t compile Vivaldi for yourself. And that’s definitely a deal breaker. Also, not having a git repository and publishing source code that way heavily damages Vivaldi’s transparency. Although it’s clear that they are not transparent in the first place by being proprietary software.
Is it chrominium or gecko based, or something completly different
Chromium
I recommend Brave when you need a Chromium-based browser. In the Chromium world you will not find anything better than Brave.
Of course, I do not recommend to use Brave as a primary browser… just for these cases when something doesn’t work in hardened Firefox ESR. I stress on hardened, because regular out of the box Firefox is simply not enough. And I stress on the ESR version of Firefox, since it’s an enterprise-grade browser which (once hardened) will serve you well for at least 9 months.
TBH, I am sad that Brave didn’t go without its own controversies and bloat. Still, it remains the only Chromium-based browser that de-Googles soooooo much cr#p in the Chromium code so that you can browse with peace of mind.
Vivaldi is definitely a no-go for me, since it’s not open source. Period. Whatever their marketing department says, being closed source is a red flag. Why? Because they can inject shady stuff even in the UI! “We are not fully open source because someone will steal our work”… hilarious. I bet that’s exactly the same reason why Chome is not open source! Somebody is going to steal Google’s work (irony & laughter).
Probably indeed Vivaldi is safe to use with some settings disabled, but if such a critical piece of software like a browser is not open source, then nobody can verify if some UI elements (like settings) really do anything or not. This problem is especially true for Android (iPhone is waaaay worse) where Google Firebase is lurking everywhere, even when you “disable” some settings in a given app. The only way to be safe there is to use something like Proton VPN or some DNS-based blocklists (they carry their own privacy risk with them tho…) to nuke Firebase on a device level.
Honestly, I use FF as my primary on Linux, and Waterfox as my primary on Windows (just because it runs better than FF on Windows fir some reason). Vivaldi I use as a secibdary browser when:
- I need to visist a website that for some stupid reason doesn’t open on FF
- When I’m studying or need to have several tabs open at the same time (by several I mean 100+, Vivaldi has really good tab management)
EDIT: I sent the reply without answering the question, I’m dumb. Anyways, some people like Vivaldi, some don’t. If you ask in a Privacy forum (and especially Lemmy) you will find less favorable opinions of Vivaldi.
My suggestion at the end of the day is just try it out and try to make your own research on how it was created and who is in charge. As I’ve undestood until now (don’t know if it has changed) is that the only thing proprietary about Vivaldi is the design(? Idk, someone correct me if I’m wrong) and that the CEO is not an.asshole (yet)
I like the way Vivaldi works and the tabs. I switched to Firefox purely to support having chrome alternatives.
I have no real answer to your question though
Vivaldi is pretty good, just ignored because it’s not opensource. It does not come across as Chrome/Brave evil.
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Brave is not terrible at all. 😒
Brave is not terrible at all. 😒
Haven’t used it myself yet, but I’ve seen it recommended: the User Agent Switcher extension. It might fix some websites you have issues with?
I used to use it and it can help. Particularly microsoft websites. It causes audio distortion on some sites though.
That’s a good suggestion, but I’m talking about websites that actually break on Firefox, not just refuse to work. I can’t send messages to my doctor because the portal gives an XML parsing error on Firefox.
Make you substantially easier to fingerprint.
I really like it and think that it has cool features that really help with productivity
I wish that it was actually open source (they don’t include the full code, most of the source is just chromium stuff and it’s published in tar archives and not git repos)
On my PC, I use Vivaldi most of the time, Firefox when I want extra privacy, and ungoogled-chromium almost never
I would be much more happy to give Vivaldi a go if we lived in a world where much more browser diversity existed.
You’d need a very good reason to not use Firefox given that it’s all that stands against a Google monopoly on web standards. I was using a Chromium-based browser myself until Opera and Microsoft both abandoned their own browser engines - after that I couldn’t possibly justify not supporting Firefox.
Vivaldi does look very good, and takes me back to the old Opera days when Opera was good. But from a privacy point of view it’s just short-sighted to use a chromium-based browser, even if that browser promises and provides privacy.
That wasn’t the point of my question. Some websites just don’t work on Firefox.
OK, fair enough, I misread your question. Honestly I’ve not really encountered many websites that don’t work on Firefox, less than 1% surely, and when I do I tend to avoid that website. If I can’t avoid it I tend to fall back to using GNOME Web (Epiphany), or ungoogled Chromium from Flathub (which I think receives regular updates, I’m not sure what the exploit you’re talking about is, should I be worried?).
On Windows, it’s just an installer with no updater. That was my issue.
Well, Vivaldi is Chromium, but stripped out all google tracking APIs, except some which are in the privacy settings to the user choice. Even the API of the Chrome store, if you demark it, Vivaldi isn’t even recognized as Chromium.
Are you replying to the right person?
I think so, because your doubts about using a Chromium and diversity. Vivaldi in first line isn’t a Chromium like others, it uses Blink as renderer and with this ends the similarity with others. Blink is currently the best engine of the 3 that already exist, discounting some exotic ones, which only have a testimonial presence among the more than 100 browsers that exist on the market and another 70 that have already given up and were abandoned.
Google’s influence on Chromium is based solely on the APIs it includes, which other manufacturers, such as Vivaldi, remove, Google’s influence is mainly on the Internet itself, on web pages that include GoogleAPIs and on the countless services and apps that Google offers. Vivaldi, by the way, was the first who, together with others and the Norwegian Consumer consortium, was active against the hegemony and abuses of Google, long before Mozilla, which continues to be subsidized by Google and even with Google devs working on Firefox.
Privacy, at this point Firefox, regarding Fingerprint protection, is somewhat better than Vivaldi, but this in Vivaldi can be achieved using an extension, such as JShelter, NoScript or similar, however it has a built-in ad- and trackerblocker that can be customized , for this Firefox needs an extension. That is, both are as private as the user wants and they are certainly currently the Browsers that best respect privacy.
Brave is not that private, apart from its shady dealings with crypto companies that like to redirect users, as well as the fact that its trackingblocker likes to ignore its sponsors, among others Facebook.
Opera (current) is even worse, it directly sells user data, not even the VPN it offers is really one, it is a simple proxy on Opera’s own servers, which also logs user activities. There’s not much left to choose from, apart from some FF or Chromium forks. It is what it is, the rest is the personal taste and needs of each user, to decide which browser is the best. The real enemy is for all user the same, those companys which convert a free internet in its private property, not the browser of other users.
Librewolf?
I’ve been using that for a while since I ditched Chrome, and anecdotally it seems like it hits a pretty good sweet spot of “privacy-protecting to such an extent that I notice little annoyances as I browse the web, but they’re all trivial and easily bearable, which probably means it’s doing quite a lot to try to protect me.”
I’m asking specifically about Chromium browsers to be used as needed for compatibility.
Ah makes sense, I read only the title, my bad
Understandable lol
Absolutely not. Its proprietary
No. Vivaldi is proprietary.
Their CEO is not an asshole (at least not publicly) but they are still not committed to privacy. Vivaldi is a commodity browser, they include UI features and other usability features which are nice. But it isn’t private, at all.
They have their own telemetry which includes an unique ID per installation and they basically have no protection against fingerprinting, a feature that Firefox (and Librewolf and Mullvad Browser) and Brave (do not use Brave) have and I consider essential.
From what I saw, it was fairly easy to turn that off in the settings and install uBlock Origin to cover the gaps in their tracker. I meant Vivaldi post-hardening, not “out of the box” with 0 settings or extensions changed.
that still doesn’t solve the lack of anti fingerprint protection. uBlock Origin can’t do that, it has to be built into the browser.
And the fact that it’s proprietary and we do not have the source code.
Yes, they provide a “part” of their source code which is mostly chromium code which is freely available anyway. this is just a marketing practice, it has no real value because it is incomplete and can’t be compiled and even if you tried to examine the available parts, they do not provide a git repository for easier examination. This is a huge reason for not trusting them. I wouldn’t place my trust on a browser that obscures it’s source that way and tries to compensate by publishing part of it. Their lack of transparency is worrisome.
There’s also the fact of the chromium monopoly but other people got that part covered.
