Vivaldi makes History
vivaldi.com
vivaldi.com
I know I'm begging for down-votes but I simply cannot understand how people can commit something as personal as web browsing to a closed source solution.
"Vivaldi Technologies doesn’t collect your history data. All of this information is strictly private and local to your computer."
https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/
Not a sure thing obviously, but it's something I haven't seen mentioned yet here.
I'd been holding off on using Vivaldi because I wanted to know exactly what information was being collected. I tried to find the privacy policy on their site, but could only find the one regarding the data their website collects.
To the Vivaldi team: You might consider making this privacy policy more prominent on your site. Not being able to find it was literally the only reason I hadn't tried your browser until now.
// later edit below
Excuse me but I am just reading on this and it seems its real open source it that sense. I did not even know this, so thank you for this. This makes Vivaldi a total no go for me.
https://vivaldi.net/userblogs/entry/a-few-words-about-open-s...
It has in fact a proprietary license:
"18 November 2016. "Subject to the terms and conditions herein, Vivaldi hereby grants You a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to install and use the Software and Services for its intended purpose. [...] Without limiting the foregoing, you are neither allowed to (a) adapt, alter, translate, embed into any other product or otherwise create derivative works of, or otherwise modify the Software ; (b) separate the component programs of the Software for use on different computers; (c) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software, except as permitted by applicable law; or (d) remove, alter or obscure any proprietary notices on the Software or the applicable documentation therein."
Anyway, license notwithstanding, they do not publish the latest source. The download page has version 1.8, whose source is not available for download. There is also no repository and so no public history of changes on a per-commit basis. It might technically be open source, but certainly not in spirit.
AFAIK the Wikipedia page for Vivaldi says its proprietary for a reason. And I don't think that reason is because of a windows installer. They release their code they build on top of chromium as open source BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO. But they build looks like they build other stuff that is "open" but not open source. At least this is what I have got from my quick look at it. This seems to follow a Opera and Chrome tradition. Even Chrome is not open source. Its 99% Chromium +1% Google crap on top of it. I am very opposed to this kind of stuff and for Opera and Vivaldi thats not just 1%.
Happy to get corrected of better educated on this.
But when a new company comes along that is trying to break that cycle? Suddenly a ton of people pop out of the woodwork to warn us there might be a privacy concern.
Ok sure, but where the hell were you guys when Apple talked about it's new file system, or LG released new smart TVs, or when a dozen other newsworthy things happened in the last week from big companies who are scooping up all of our data? These are not companies that might scoop up data. These are companies that are already doing it.
Look, I'm full-bore tinfoil hat guy, but after watching this for years, there seems to be a lot of selective outrage going on online. Some folks get a free pass. Some folks get trashed for much less. I find that very odd.
On the "history" upgrade idea - that's a really cool one; It's quite often that I'm looking for that page I accessed last year, or that youtube video somebody sent me a few months ago, and I forgot it's name - hopefully chromium/firefox steal this idea and improve upon it;
I understand the value of open source. But I'm still not sure if it matters. A lot of people think that open source software does not track personal data. But how do they know? Have they read all the code? Do they even understand all code?
It's much easier to run Wireshark to check what the program does. That's how the world found out about what Windows 10 is sending to MS.
In the end it's about trust.
This means that if an open-source project does nefarious things, there's a good chance that a fork will come along and that people will start using that fork instead. So, you yourself don't have to read every single line of code for it to be relatively certain that an open-source project does not do bad things.
There are of course exceptions to this. For example there are a lot of things that a lot of people are not fond of with Chromium. There are forks which try to address this (for example [0]), but Google has so much development workforce behind Chromium that such a fork has a hard time keeping up with merging security patches and updates in general.
But even in that case, open-source offers protection without you reading every line of code. Because there's people out there who earn their daily bread by uncovering these sort of things: Journalists.
Due to the source code being available, they have definitive proof and can slap these kind of stories on the front page. I mean, heck, Heart Bleed came on national TV in my country. If that vulnerability had been in closed-source software, they could have only ever reported about rumors.
Besides that, as far as I remember that link only discloses their changes to Chromium, not everything that's part of Vivaldi. From what I've heard, the rest can apparently be extracted from the Vivaldi binary, but I have yet to see a demonstration of someone actually compiling Vivaldi from that.
I'm using only newest snapshots (so they should be considered unstable) as my daily work & private browser and never had a reason to roll back. IIRC they using even nightlies from Blink in their snapshots, so "getting behind" shouldn't be considered a problem I think.
But putting everything aside, let's assume they're 40 days behind Blink always - are you THAT geeky that you need these new Blink features instantly, when noone actually implements them anywhere (I'm taking about new JS stuff for example), because noone would be able to use this features, as this is cutting-edge-blink-only-feature?
0: http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...
I made it a habit to look at the tool after a session of browsing, and try to understand if my browsing was productive or not. Then try to think what I would to differently the next time.
This can help improving your browsing habits.
Now, the title feels a bit like clickbait (had to click to get an idea of what it was about).
I'm using Chrome and run several profiles: personal, work, social media etc. Since I tend to use all of these throughout the day, I have several browser windows and several tabs. This is not very convenient. I would prefer system where I could share the same window with multiple profiles, maybe even having a list a combined list of tabs from different profiles on the left side.
100% on this, Though I will say it is a very cool feature.
This way, be it local or an online service like Google Calendar, the data would be under your control and would make sense across computers, and could be viewed in relation to other time-based data.
i.e. if your tweets also ended up in a calendar you could see the tweets that led to a browse, that led to a bookmark, that led to a new tweet. You could later on make sense of your own activities.
If I were at Google, this is what I'd want to work on: How to bring together data to make it useful for the user, rather than just useful as part of a profile for advertisers. History is a lot less scary when it provides the user with the bulk of the value.
On the other hand, I'd argue that showing it at that level of detail to the user makes it more scary.
- I still won't use it because googling/favorites are faster.
- Somebody might find this useful if he/she wants to spy on the user.
Not sure if the time investment was worth it. I only use it as a reference browser.