Vivaldi Browser: Chrome engine, no personal data collected | Hacker News Reader

Vivaldi Browser: Chrome engine, no personal data collected

vivaldi.com

54 pointsnetgusto53 comments

Is Vivaldi Open Source?

https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/

Short answer: no.

Long answer: no, but...

    Vivaldi is not made available under one
    unified open source license. It does contain
    the Chromium source code with changes made
    to allow the HTML/CSS/JS based UI to run.
    All changes to the Chromium source code
    are made available under a BSD license and can
    be read by anyone on vivaldi.com/source/.
    Details in this regard are explained in
    the the README and LICENSE files within the package.

    In addition, our UI code is written in plain,
    accessible code for those who read HTML, CSS and JS.
    This means that for all practical purposes
    the Vivaldi source code is available for audit.

    Vivaldi also contains third party code. Licenses
    for these parts can be found in the source
    package and in the installed browser by
    navigating to vivaldi://credits

As it isn't open-source, how can you trust this? What certify me that my data are safely stored and don't sold to commercial partners??

I have the same reaction. I'd sooner use Firefox with a few privacy-enhancing extensions.

I'm running Chromium with HTTPS everywhere, uBlock Origin, Wappalyzer (curiosity purpose) & Bitwarden (password manager). It's the best setup I found regarding performances & energy consumption for my GNU/Linux laptops.

It might be in terms of performance and energy consumption, but it is clearly not when it comes to privacy.

Could you explain, what privacy issues exist with Chromium?

From https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys:

> Some features of Chromium use Google APIs, and to access those APIs, either an API Key or a set of OAuth 2.0 tokens is required. Setting up API keys is optional. If you don't do it, the specific APIs using Google services won't work in your custom build, but all other features will run normally.

From experience, running without API key means that the browser will nag you at every start. If it doesn't, you do have them and then the browser uses APIs mentioned on the page.

This was one of the more egregious ones from a few years ago; since fixed, but as far as I'm concerned the trust was permanently broken (what's to stop them from doing something similar and hiding it better, after all this made it past the package maintainer until a user complained).

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786909

By the way, I think this comment [0] sums it up well for many HN folks:

> As a web developer, I like chrome. As a private person, I uninstalled it. You might call it a feature or a core extension, most people consider this spyware.

[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435...

What data are you afraid of being stored and sold exactly? Does Vivaldi route your traffic through company servers?

Stuff like my browser fingerprint, what extensions am I using, what website am I browsing, what operating system am I running, what is my location, etc.

It's not about conspiracy theories, just acknowledging that we don't know what's happening under the hood.

And how is this related to Vivaldi in particular? How is it different from any other software and service out there? You don't know what websites do with your client data (fingerprint, extensions, etc), what cookies they write & read and who are they selling that data to. If there are no laws preventing them from doing such BS, all you can do is trust, believe and hope they do the right thing (GDPR is a move in the right direction here). Having a basic understanding of the internet and tracking helps, using proper tools to help yourself is even better (cookie manager, uMatrix, uBlock and alike).

It's not related to Vivaldi in particular, it's related to the fact that you must give a blind trust to all non open-source browser you decide to use.

> You don't know what websites do with your client data (fingerprint, extensions, etc), what cookies they write & read and who are they selling that data to.

You can take actions within the browser and on your network to mitigate what websites can and can't do with your data. However, if your browser itself is compromised and closed source, there's nothing you can do about it and you can't even be sure what data is being extracted and used.

You haven't read the source?

* https://vivaldi.com/source/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17950610

That's a deflection and avoiding an answer. You say that you do not know what is happening under the hood. There's a published archive of program source code to read. So what is stopping you from reading it and finding out what the program does under the hood? Difficulty with tar? Or with xz?

Only the third party code- chromium and vivaldis changes on top are all public

They may be "public", they still aren't open-source, see r3b1's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17950642

Saw that Tell HN yesterday about Chrome logging you in to Gmail.

Switched to Firefox. It's so damn fast nowadays (it wasn't up until a while back)

Good job at amazing people at Mozilla. You're killing it.

And UI is better than chrome IMO. Built-in dark mode rules.

I'm missing a "Why we are doing this" section on the website. It's not open-source and I wonder what their motivation is. How are they making money?

Vivaldi ships with a load of preselected bookmarks. Mainly big news sites and some online stores. It seems like there is some affiliate marketing going on there. Some of these bookmarks link to a vivaldi.com page that redirects you to a siteplug.com page which again redirects you to the actual page.

Example bookmark: AliExpress -> https://vivaldi.com/bk/aliexpresscom-us -> http://ww2.siteplug.com/fly?${tracking params} -> https://best.aliexpress.com/?${more tracking params}

Siteplug seems to be the service with they use to monetize the traffic. Notice that the redirect link doesn't offer a https version. Neither does their website [0] that also just shows me a dead bird on most pages [1].

[0]: http://siteplug.com [1]: http://siteplug.com/for-partners

Well you could always turn to an encyclopaedia.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)#History

Re: "Why we are doing this", see https://vivaldi.com/company/

From wiki: > "Vivaldi began as a virtual community website that replaced My Opera, which was shut down by Opera Software in March 2014.[15] Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner was angered by this decision because he believed that this community helped make the Opera web browser what it was. Tetzchner then launched the Vivaldi Community—a virtual community focused on providing registered users with a discussion forum, blogging service, and numerous other practical web services—to make up for My Opera's closure. Later, on January 27, 2015, Vivaldi Technologies launched—with the community in mind[16]—the first technical preview of the Vivaldi web browser."

As for income, it's the standard browser model – partnerships with default search engines and bookmarks.

I moved back to Firefox after an update to Vivaldi started lagging badly when I woke up my PC. Maybe it was an extension, but after disabling some of them I realised I don't really have time or inclination to find out.

Another thing I didn't like was the re-purposing of the F6 button so it didn't highlight the URL any more (I guess I could change this; not sure) and the history page, which seemed quite confusing whenever I tried to use it.

It's not a bad browser but neither is it so good I want to put up with those times it breaks or does something gratuitously different.

I tried Vivaldi a few days ago as Firefox, despite their efforts to up performance, is still far too slow for me. The disadvantage I found that Vivaldi has is the number of extensions is basically 0 (please correct me if I am wrong). Installing chrome extensions is possible if you build from source and bake in the extensions, which is not something I am interested in.

I currently use Opera, but I am unsure about the privacy. Opera works very well though and there is an extension that allows installing chrome-extensions which works out very well.

Any thoughts on Opera's privacy?

You can install any Chrome extension using the regular Chrome web store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/

Link is on the "Apps" page: vivaldi://apps

Wow, how strange. I just reinstalled vivaldi and checked and I couldn't install extensions because 'Add to Chrome' read 'Available on Chrome', redirecting me to a chrome download page. After refreshing the button changes to 'Add to chrome'!? Either way, now I CAN install extensions. Thanks for making me retry.

They were bought out by a Chinese consortium a few years ago. Other than that, they have an in-built VPN (SurfEasy) that mines your data: https://www.surfeasy.com/privacy_policy/

Thanks for pointing this out to me. Seeing as I was wrong about the chrome extension support I'll give them another try!

What are the benefits of Opera over chrome?

> I found that Vivaldi has is the number of extensions is basically 0 (please correct me if I am wrong)

Vivaldi uses addons from Chrome store. I never had any issues just clicking the "ADD TO CHROME" button.

Wow, as I commented above here as well, when I tried the chrome store a few days ago I saw a 'Available in Chrome' button the lead to the download page of google chrome. What I didn't see is that when I refresh a few times the button changes to 'Add to Chrome'. Is this a bug in either the chrome store or Vivaldi? Not sure, but now I can use Vivaldi WITH chrome extensions. Thanks for making me try it out again.

A colleague of mine tried Vivaldi 1.5 years ago, while he liked the split screen feature he found it way too slow and it had serious lagging issues from time to time. Much can happen in 1.5 years and I don't know if they were using V8 back then. But yeah, what I saw wasn't really that impressive. And no open source? Yeah, I think I'll stick with Firefox and my tinfoil hat extensions a while longer.

Performance is just fine, no issues running dozens of tabs daily, no "lagging" whatsoever. And split screen is amazing, yes.

Firefox is slow as molasses for me, Chrome-based browsers feel SO MUCH snappier - I'm talking about things like e.g. tab-detaching.

I moved fully to Vivaldi about half a year ago and I couldn't be happier. There are only 2 issues I've encountered so far:

- sometimes, video in full screen is flickering (known issue) - sometimes, when the tab is closed while playing video in full screen, the whole browser UI disappears and the only way to fix this is to kill and restart the browser - the obvious workaround is to never close the tab while being in full screen

Other than that I'm very impressed with Vivaldi. Gestures, clean and USABLE interface, web panels are great features that I can hardly work without anymore.

Firefox speed was always holding me back. With the new Chrome update, Chrome became slower for me, tried FF (hadn't since Quantum) and it's now actually faster than Chrome for me. So I switched :)

This is a tuned version of open-source Chromium with extra ergonomics. Made by the original Opera dev since they split a few years ago. Twenty years track record in making fast and secure stuff.

Why just use one browser???

I always have four or more and Vivaldi is #1 or #2 but FF is my mail/chat because of the containers

I would be more convinced in their "we respect and protect your right to privacy" if there wasn't a "we use cookies to enhance your experience" banner at the top.

The main reason I like Vivaldi is because I can use a lot of the functionality which I could get in the old Opera (ver 12 and earlier).

The keyboard controls (especially the single key shortcuts) save a huge amount of time. An example would be to navigate across tabs, or close all the tabs on the right (or left) are a huge timesaver.

Additionally, viewing pages in the reader view (again with a single key shortcut) gets rid of all the unnecessary stuff on the web page.

People who remember the power of the old Opera browser should give this a shot.

How does it differ from Brave [0]? (Which is also based on Chrome, is free and open source, and well integrated even in Xubuntu, for the latest dev version [1])

[0] https://brave.com

[1] https://brave.com/download-dev/

In addition to what you noted, Brave has an integrated Ad-blocking / Tracker blocking software enabled by default + an integrated way to compensate content producers for the incurring loss of revenue.

Vivaldi has some neat features like Tab stacks and Split screen.

You can actually dock the dev tools to the side of the window in Vivaldi.

Developer mindshare is important for the success of a browser and, right now, if I go to 'caniuse' there are all of the main browsers plus a few that have no interest to me - old I.E., 'Opera Mini' and so on.

For Vivaldi to get a little bit further they need to become a first class browser that developers think about, test with and talk about.

It uses the same engine as Chrome/Chromium, my guess would be in 99% if not 100% of cases they will behave the same.

ungoogled-chromium is what I use

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Thanks for that. I hadn't heard of it before. Will give it a shot as well.

Closed-Source. No thank you.

https://vivaldi.com/source

No thanks, just throwing a tarball a someone else face is not making anything "open-source".

That's source available, not open source.

You can view the source, but you can't contribute to it, create forks, etc.

Source available is one of the prerequisites for software to be considered open source, but not the only one.

They have a page [1] asking the question "Is Vivaldi Open Source?" which does not answer in the affirmative. Instead, it says "for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit", which is quite a different thing.

[1] https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/

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