I know we aren’t allowed to use Chrome. We can’t use Brave. But how does the Lemmy community feel about the Vivaldi Browser? or is it still not Firefox…

  • @[email protected]English
    5•1 year ago

    I personally love Vivaldi. It’s really been the only browser for me that’s met everything I wanted. Customizable, looks good. And has a whole synchronization suite as well.

    I honestly just don’t want to use Firefox at this point because I’m sick of Mozilla and their bad financial records (in 2021, the CEO gave themselves a 5 million bonus. And a good majority of their money still comes from Google), and the fact that they’ve kind of shifted their priorities away from Firefox in favor of more political activism activities. Which is annoying because Firefox is still the only other browser that has everything I need.

    Yeah I do wish Vivaldi was fully open source but they’ve already mentioned that a lot of their stuff is besides their UI (which they’re keeping private for branding reasons). I think Its kind of ridiculous, but it’s not that big of a deal I guess since right now Vivaldi is just Chromium with an extra coat of paint.

    • @sqibkwEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I jumped ship from Firefox to Vivaldi back in 2020 for the same reasons. Not only did Firefox give some huge pay raises to their execs, but they also laid off tons of people at the same time. By tons of people, I mean like 250 all at once, and they only had 750 people working there total in 2020. Huge shame that they’re just pocketing all the money meant for something important, to keep browsers diverse.

      In my experience, Vivaldi has had superior customization and privacy settings, even to those in Firefox and Brave.

      And about the UI code being closed source, from what I can tell, it’s all minified JavaScript. So while they don’t have documented code on GitLab or anything, anyone can still parse through it and run security checks on it if they want. Not perfect, but at least it’s there.