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.
Vivaldi go out to their customers (that's not you) and say "We have 1000 suckers who have downloaded and use our closed source, Chromium cloned, browser. We can serve your website as a bookmark to them, or add you to their search engine list if you give us $x."
Since you are not their "customer" (that's the people paying them to appear in your settings) what are you? You are the "product", you are what Vivaldi is selling.
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