I'm not affiliated. Happy user.
Ladybird seems to be the only hope, once available.
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?
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.
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.
Expecting FF to listen to a million individual users is not a good expectation. Expecting FF to be prone to listening to a single powerful voice would be a better expectation. However, FF has not assimilated into yet another Chrome, so there's some evidence they are not giving in to the whims of that powerful voice.
If Firefox and Apple can't rein in Google with their competing engines, what exactly does Ladybird change?
Straight from the source:
Same reason some of us choose Linux over Windows.
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?
That doesn't really seem relevant these days though. Although I guess duopolies are totally fine.
I like Servo, but it's also very early in its development. There's no choice but to hold on for now.
Both projects (Chromium and Firefox) are open, so it's like Linux vs FreeBSD, but at least FreeBSD has a clear licensing advantage.
No defeatism though please, some of us will advocate till the end (pen & paper)
"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."
- 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?
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...
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".
It's open in all of the ways that matter, basically they just want to protect their look and feel.
> 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.
> "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.
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.
You literally can if you want, it's just JavaScript and CSS, you just can't redistribute it as your own.
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.
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.
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!
How are you paying them? And have you done any network analysis on it recently (I really would like to know!)?
I would rather have this experience with Firefox but they are probably more busy focusing on email, vpn and whatever the flavor of the month is.
I have it configured to be ultra minimal with the look of Arc that I loved.
Moreover, Vivaldi has a great advantage over both Firefox and Chrome, in it the command to print a Web page usually works fine, while in both Firefox and Chrome it almost never works correctly.
Both Firefox and Chrome are almost never able to render correctly a "printed" page, even if they render the same page perfectly on screen. In the printed page, the graphic elements have almost always wrong sizes, which results in overlapped or invisible page elements. I suppose that this is caused by the fact that many Web pages stupidly use element sizes in pixels, instead of using length units, e.g. points or inches or mm, and both Firefox and Chrome might scale pixels wrongly when rendering for resolutions that differ from that of the screen, while Vivaldi scales them correctly.
Besides the "Print" command, the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands, as alternatives to keyboard shortcuts, so you do not need to move the hand from the mouse while browsing.
Firefox on Linux has much more problems than Firefox on Windows, mostly because it does not support many GPUs, so it frequently disables WebGL or it cannot use hardware support for playing videos, even now, in 2026. This breaks many sites.
Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies in comparison with their Windows versions.
Whenever I encounter a broken site, it's because I blocked some advertising scripts and the whole thing fell apart with a slew of JavaScript errors. I'm quite happy to avoid such shoddy sites.
The problem is not stability, but the fact that there are multiple APIs, and it is unknown which of them will be available on the user system, so a browser may need to support all of them.
For instance, for video decoding on a GPU, the Linux APIs differ depending on the GPU vendor, unless you use Vulkan, but Vulkan video decoding is not available in old computers. Even so, Firefox could have used some higher-level API that takes care of the low-level GPU-dependent details (e.g. ffmpeg).
More baffling is the failure of Firefox to use OpenGL or Vulkan for implementing WebGL, depending on the GPU vendor, because at least the OpenGL API has not changed in a very long time. I have no idea which is the reason (because Firefox does not provide adequate error messages), unless they depend on some vendor-specific OpenGL extensions. I use an NVIDIA GPU, on which I cannot enable WebGL in Firefox, despite the fact that WebGL works fine in Vivaldi and Chromium/Chrome and I use a very great number of OpenGL and Vulkan applications, including some written by myself, all of which work perfectly, with no problems whatsoever.
Some sites also simply to not test their stuff on Firefox since it has such a small market share, and Firefox _does_ have minor incompatibilities that only tend to show up when using overly fancy Javascript or CSS frameworks. (But this is far less common than the first point above.)
ProTip: Try to do your thing in Guest Mode. It will almost certainly work there.
Have been a Vivaldi user for many years.
Vivaldi is made by people who left Opera after it was bought by a Chinese company, and the mouse gestures are similar. Ny favorites: "Hold right mouse button, click left" is the browser back gesture, and "hold left, click right" is forward.
You can tell the Vivaldi devs care about that kind of stuff. I don't want to use a chromium-based browser as my daily driver, but I like a lot of what they're doing.
You can open whatsapp web or a pdf or most other websites and just scroll. The difference is massive.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit-we...
vivaldi was doing something weird for me, can’t exactly remember what now. seemingly unprompted it would switch tabs or go back in history or something.
turns out i’d tried to be clever, set up a mouse gesture and forgotten about it. xD
Classic
To do list: make huge spreadsheet of hotkeys across programs and periodically feed them back to myself as flashcards based on [lack of] usage
KeyCue didn’t seem to cut it but maybe skill issue
Do they do any sort of third-party auditing of the closed parts?
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
* on my phone, can’t inspect the tars
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-sou...
Someone mirrored it.
I don't trust them one bit. There was that telemetry analysis that showed Vivaldi as a very noisy browser.
how so? how do you know this?
Everyone opining here should MitM themselves every now and then. If not for your own security then maybe to make sure you're not participating in psyop when opining online and resharing hearsay or old truisms.
*screw Google and their AI search
So the answer seems to be:
- search partnerships
- direct match partnerships
- bookmarks partnerships
- donation
- cut when people sign up for advertised products (proton vpn, not sure if others)
Or at least that was the case in 2019
It scales up with usage as well. Not that Safari needed funding, but Google pays Apple upwards of $20,000,000,000 per year for the privilege of being the default for that user base.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...
I hope they keep it up.
To put more simply, just look at how many preferences its preference dialog has compared to other browsers. It feels like nobody else is even doing anything except coming up with a new CSS property nobody is going to use every 3 months.
Everyone says they love Firefox, but every time Firefox adds a new feature it's a feature Vivaldi already had for years.
Imo extension is the ultimate way to customize your browser experience.
It's not technical difficulties, there are open source projects that have such support.
I also don't believe it's against any TOS because some of these browser are available in the Google play store.
I just don't get why they refuse to do that.
If you don't have the ability to police extensions you're basically putting your users up for sale?
The problem you linked to also happened on desktop because there is no VSCode for phones.
Swap packages for extensions in the above and let me know how that's different
If anything, wouldn't a phone extension be more sandboxed than most desktop environments?
I eventually switched to Edge a few years ago because it was nice and lite. Now I’m seeing the same pattern play out as they add copilot, shopping, and rewards programs.
What browser should I check out next? Some must haves: workspaces, vertical tabs, and chromium extension support.
It might not be the best security idea to rely on a relatively obscure browser like this, but I find it very pleasant to use.
There's way to much stuff, to many feature and when the rendering engine is just Blink, I don't really see much of a reason to use it over Firefox.
Nice work though and wonderful to see a 3rd party browser maker giving it a go.
Then we need to have a discussion about that because in case of Vivaldi you are in fact not the product.
I'm not sure if this [1] is still relevant, but it appears that Vivaldi makes money by promoting search engines and bookmarks to their users via their closed source, secret, Chromium fork.
If my usage of their Chromium clone is being used to sell search engines/website bookmarks, then I am indeed the product.
There does also seem to be a VPN option on their site that I'm assuming I can pay for, which seems it could be an actually buyable product rather than selling my usage of their browser.
I’m really curious what gave you this impression. Vivaldi doesn’t hide its business model, yet you were so confident!
- The choice in the wizard defaults to no blocking of ads and trackers
- Third Party cookies enabled by default
- WebRTC IP leaking is the default
- No option not to persist history/permanent incognito mode
Etc
I imagine it leaks your list of extensions just like chromium too
That's something I've always wanted.
Only Firefox seems to offer it. Firefox can also open external links in incognito (eg if you tap a link in another app, it will open in a firefox private window)
Duckduckgo browser and Brave can be set to delete all data upon start, which is similar but not quite the same because things are still persisted until they're cleaned up at the next start (they say it happens on exit but it really happens on start, because catching exit isn't reliable or something).
Brave also has no way to have exceptions for certain websites (Duckduckgo can, they call it fireproofing).
Ohh I didn't realise Firefox persisted the toggle to Private mode on Android! (Properly, even if you Force Quit). I was using Brave previously, which doesn't do that, so assumed the same.
Though it says "Firefox deletes your cookies, history and site data when you close all your private tabs" ... so I'm not exactly sure what gets persisted and what persisted gets deleted when
The only browser that allows me to tile 3,4,5... pages in the same view. Or to group pages into "stacks" or many other small but useful perks.
I use Aerospace for tiling everything now but it breaks Safari scrolling performance so when that becomes annoying I force the Safari window to floating mode.
> You deserve better
Probably better to avoid (Chromium-based) Vivaldi then.
One of the main reasons I switched to Vivaldi a few years ago was that it allowed and even advertised a "classic" browser experience. By which I mean: tabs that behaved like tabs, visual separation, not a lot of useless whitespace and corner-radius-maxxed borders everywhere.
Looks like that's all gone now and Vivaldi is just yet another generic "flat design" browser. Time to look for something else...
I appreciate the intention to protect my privacy. How does that square with Manifest V2 deprecation as dictated by the adtech company (Google)?
Also, for years I’ve been uncomfortable using Chromium as I’m uncomfortable raising that statistic any more, since I don’t want the Internet to be designed for one particular engine. Maybe Vivaldi 9.0 will be the biggest design overhaul of all time and even refactor based on Gecko like Firefox :)
You wouldn't be able to even if you wanted because there is no good way to export/import your changes for the trade to happen
Otherwise removing a few borders seems a bit underwhelming for a major version bump
I just wish the address bar were expanding fully to the right when selected, with the "Show Full Address" setting on and right-side vertical tabs. Otherwise, one has to jump around the visible part of the address bar in order to find the right part.
Edit: details.
I am talking about limited width of the address bar (when it’s part of the right column with tabs, taking a third of screen’s width at max), not its height or any other elements.
I understand if you want to stick with Firefox, but until Ladybird and co are ready for prime time, I'm sticking with Vivaldi.
This major release bump is a bit disapointing though. Was expecting some more headlining features than just a bit of a UI clean up.
Page tiling is perhaps the killer feature, but overall I like how Vivaldi is a browser for power users who know how they want to use the web. I find it refreshing in the era of browsers trying to be very thin terminals. The only thing missing from Vivaldi is being truly FOSS instead of their hybrid source-available model.
>our biggest design overhaul, ever
>A new look for a new era
Sorry, couldn't resist... :)
The proposed solution didn't work by the way. I uninstalled right there.
can't we just have tabs + tiling (either tiles in tabs, or tabs in tiles, both can work), and call it a day?
that's all I need from browsing today
That's their thing. Though a lot can be disabled.
> can't we just have tabs + tiling
Maybe Min or Zen Browser is more your thing?
It's also fantastic for tab hoarders like me.
Wonder if the site dev was thinking of the astronaut pointing a gun at another astronaut meme when they put this in.
Ah nevermind I see a chromium fork, I skip
First release was 11 years ago. Why not?
Also there is no standard for version releases. I mean there probably is, but none that you have to follow.
> how can you trust closed source?
Same as using Android or windows or iOS.
None of these approaches is any more correct than the other and theres zero chance of getting everyone to agree only one should be used. You just have to understand which delivery approach is being taken to consume it accordingly.
E.g. 1.4.8, 14.8, and 148 all tell their own story. 1.4.8 implies many small releases with a few decent size changes along the way. 14.8 implies a medium speed (perhaps ~yearly) regular delivery if bigger enhancements with minor patches/fixes in between. 148 implies a long running continuous rapid delivery of all things as they become available.