To everybody who says ohohoho Vivaldi can’t be trusted because it’s proprietary…
Yes under the DEFINITION it is not Open Source because it misses ONE of the required categories to be Open Source, and that is the licensing which prevents users from customizing the UI and releasing a fork of it.
HOWEVER, the code IS there, it IS source available, and it CAN be audited.
Link for more info: https://piped.video/watch?v=oCyIzqmc_PQ&t=0
Vivaldi is just stock Chromium on the backend, everything that came from Vivaldi is UI or sync which is proprietary. I use Vivaldi as my main browser, but I hate when it gets called open-source for the pure fact that they don’t subscribe to the values open-source stands for. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad product.
That is the point. It is true that the script for the unique UI that Vivaldi has is proprietary (about 5% of the total), but it can be modified by the user to adapt it to his personal preferences, there are even threads in the Vivaldi community that teach how to do it. There is no reason to suspect any code that has malicious functions in the UI. It is not the same as in Chrome, EDGE or Opera, with completely proprietary and non-auditable layers that go far beyond the mere UI and where no one can verify their function without reverse engineering. I think that OpenSource is important in new products that allow shared development, but OpenSource should not be confused with reliability, privacy and security, this has nothing to do with it and only depends on the ethics and intention of the Devs or the company, apart from the value of OpenSource in a product whose market is more than saturated with more than 100 browsers and forks and another 70 already abandoned, is quite debatable.
Oh my god… Vivaldi won in every Category! Who would have thought?
What a surprise!
No checkbox for spyware? I hear Vivaldi fares well in that regard too.
Dont us vivaldi https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/vivaldi
Of course, it makes many calls to Vivaldi on startup, which is normal if you have sync enabled, it’s not so scandalous if it collects technical and statistical values, which any browser does. It is also true that Vivaldi cannot be compiled with the Source Code, because 5% of the script related to the UI are proprietary, but they are 100% auditable and even modifiable by the user, the Forum even teaches how to do it. The only thing that this is not allowed to use these scripts for other Browsers. All other Data is stored locally or is part of the data that is synced, no Data is sold to third parties. It is true that one of the Search Engines is Bing, which comes by default, but everyone is free to delete it, if they don’t want to use it (as any other sponsor link or search engine), and add any other search engine(s) of their choice (Firefox by default has Google search). The Data that supposedly goes to Google is relative to the Chrome Store, but even these can be turned off, although then you can’t download extensions from there. Critical is certainly the use of Cloudflare on its official page. So this Spyware Risk thing is somewhat exaggerated.
Discussion in the community about this https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/88821/vivaldi-is-spyware/8?_=1689249574264
That forum post is about styling the UI. Irrelevant when discussing whether any closed source code is safe. Its not auditable if the code isn’t published.
Data that goes to google … can be turned off
Can it?
Even if you disable everything under “Google Services” and “Google Extensions” under “Privacy” in settings, it will still make automatic connections to Google
@breadsmasher @Zerush, modding Vivaldi is certainly about modding the UI part, precisely the suposing “no auditable” proprietary part, the only it has. All other is OpenSource.
Read also the forum discussion about Vivald Spyware in the added link.
Mozilla send user data to Google (Alphabet), Vivaldi don’t. Mozilla spyware risk for this? I don’t think so.Being able to supply custom functionality and css to the UI is not the same as being able to review the UI source code. Not really sure why people are finding that so difficult to understand.
@breadsmasher, difficult to understand what means auditable? How will you modify a source with unknown content?
Try it with Chrome, EDGE or Opera. Not the same, there is nothing auditable or modificable, at least if you don’t use reverse engineering, which in Vivaldi isn’t needed. The UI source is the only proprietary script but not hidden, it’s simply a license thing.
If it go OpenSource, in the next versión Chrome and Edge will use it and kill with this all other Browser in the market.Talking generally. You can build a system which accepts new source code and styles and applies them.
Think about modding games for example. They are created without access to source code. The developers provide the ability to add new functionality to the system without providing the source code.
Heres the source code for Chromium upon which Chrome is built
https://github.com/chromium/chromium
You can modify chrome, edge, firefox. Plenty of themes and extensions exist. Just because its not a simple css file doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.
