I wish Vivaldi wasn’t Chrome, I wish they didn’t sell Opera to a Chinese predatory loan company, but I find this browser to be the best by far. It has a lot of privacy functions built in, so no third party extensions needed. And remember, with almost everything that is free, you and your data is the product. So less companies hoarding in tour data is a plus. Next to that it’s so user friendly. Mouse gestures, tab grouping, built in Proton VPN option, and so much more. Really a browser made to personalize and for ergonomics.
Still Chromium based. Pass. Librewolf
It’s really funny that the bold stance in tech now is essentially, “hey, we won’t fuck with our product.”
Vivaldi putting up a W by pledging to simply not do anything. It’s that easy.
Mozilla should really take note. For all that talk about ethics - more than a whole manifesto worth - they really would rather reject the easy W.
I too pledge not to put AI in your life!
I mean, I’m not a programmer, and I have no products, but…I needed a win in my life, and if I get a W by pledging not to do things I wasn’t going to do anyways? I’ll take it!
I also pledge not to eat unhealthy today.
…I might break that one actually. We’ll see.
Just like that, you get a W!
In a lot of cases I find that the more recent tech comes out, the more I don’t want it. It’s kinda nice when something that works, just keeps working and isn’t trying to integrate everything new for no reason.
Yeah, I miss the late 00s, when every new tech release was actually fun and exciting. Now it’s just “we increased a few specs and shoehorned in an ai feature that no one actually wants”
I’ve been struggling with this shift too. Tech used to game changing ideas for people, now it’s sole purpose is a vehicle for corporate profits. Tech used to be an exciting Wild West of crazy new ideas and new ways to be creative or play or communicate and share with friends or do less work. Now consumer focused tech is just minor evolutions of current tech launched with billion dollar marketing campaigns, corporate traps to lock you into app addictions or various subscriptions to see stock price increase 0.1%. And I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.
It doesn’t help anything, but I’ve started finding the remaining or recreated web 1.0 corners of the internet. Like creating a gopher hole and joining a pubnix server. Something about being nice to not have the modern internet always trying to track me or sell me something. Dunno.
This is great, but my immediate concern is what’s going to happen to ad blocking.
The built in blocker is already great for that; you can even add additional sources (EastList, Peter Lowe, etc) or add in your own. It’s not as powerful as UBO but on Android Vivaldi where there are no extensions having EasyList configured as a blocker works on Youtube.
Hmm. I might be interested in switching to Vivaldi.
I might give them the benefit of the doubt and try them again ('t has been years since)
while i don’t use them as my main browser it feels vivaldi is one of the few ones who at least tries something new. who isn’t just trying to emulate chrome with a few quality of life ones. i remember them introducing tiled tabs, stacked tabs, the tab bar on the sides or the bottom, way before i’ve seen any other browser do that? might not have been the first with all of those but at least firefox, chrome and edge didn’t have that as an option back then
Tab management on Vivaldi is second to none. I pray every day that they swap to a Firefox backend one day, would be the best browser by a mile
That’s why I still use them as my main. I can’t close tabs, so between their workspaces with tiled tabs and tab memory management not keeping 200 processes open (I know!) it’s been amazing for me. My only reservation is it being chromium.
What makes firefox’s backend better? I’ve been considering switching from it lately.
It’s not chrome
Basically this.
Any browser that leverages Google’s Chromium project is enabling Google to continue to drive the web. Alternative browsers, first and foremost, must not be built using Chromium.
Not that Firefox’s back end is better rather that every other browser out there is some form of chromium which means Google getting to control the internet.
On PC I’ve used them pretty much since the start and I have very little to complain about.
On mobile (iOS) I tried a few times but it’s unbearably slow.
The issue with iOS is all browsers have to use Safari backend so it’s not the same as on other devices.
yeah I use vivaldi on mobile and it’s so painfully slow and horrible. I’d switch but I hate using my phone anyways so I don’t really care.
I’ve also been on Vivaldi since right around the start. I’d just wish they would fix their address bar suggestions to actually work. It isn’t great to start, and then decides to completely break every few months and do stuff like when I type “you” to go to youtube it insists on autofilling to a specific video I watched months ago. The only fix I’ve found is to nuke the profile and start over.
I’ve switched to Zen on my computer a couple months ago exclusively because of that issue.
Vivaldi’s UI Autohide is legitimately great; I use it all the time in my browsing flow.
ardi60, interesting to see Vivaldi’s pledge against AI in the browser. As developers, we’re often looking for efficiency gains, and AI tools (like code completion or even intelligent debugging) are becoming pretty standard. Do you think this ‘no AI’ stance might hinder their ability to attract developers or power users who value those kinds of integrated features? I’m curious about the long-term vision there and if it’s more about data privacy than outright feature avoidance. We’ve been looking at how to balance user privacy with helpful AI enhancements in our own developer tools — found some good insights here on the trade-offs.
I’m so gonna try vivaldi when I finally have some issue with librewolf or if
While this might seem like a win, I am not sure if I want an AI free browser. This might be an unpopular take, but there are a lot of applications where AI is actually useful. And I’m unsure if hand waving it entirely away is an actually good thing. And if they ever include some minor AI thing, people will call this lbacktracking. Maybe not a good idea?
The thing about coming up with a new invention that’s useful is, you don’t have to keep convincing everyone that it’s useful. There are things that it’s good for and they are already being used for that. What we are seeing now is an attempt to force it into every nook and cranny to justify the massive wealth bubble that they have created out of it to prop up the economy so they don’t lose money. Eventually they will have all their money in the right place and they will let the economy crash and let the common man take 100% of the blow.
I agree. I don’t think we have to push people into using some truly revolutionary tech. Then it would not be revolutionary.
The thing that frustrates me most about AI is that the companies that use AI in their software have ZERO creativity. A lot of applications and operating systems could have had AI in a lot of very narrow usecases. Everything from suggesting which command you should complete in the terminal, to where you should put your file for good organization.
I do know that AI is becoming synonymous with LLMs, and ML would be better for many usecases. The difference is that using LLMs is super easy for it, even if not as good.
Instead, we have this ridiculous thing in which we’re supposed to remove the human part. That goes for art, music, and writing text. I think it’s quite disrespectful to send messages to family, friends and colleagues that are written by AI, with few exceptions.
Vivaldi, Zen and Librewolf are a trio of technophobic browsers, nithing new.
You just named the only 3 good browsers.
stick to chrome then.
