Off-topic, but: does anyone know how Vivaldi is funded? I tried looking for it for a bit, but couldn't find any income streams.
The short version is: they get money from things like search engine deals, which guide Vivaldi users to third-party services.
I’m just finding it really hard to believe that it’s sustainable and makes them enough money to run a team…
Firefox is funded the same way, and they seem to have plenty of income...
But my point was more around how the minimal amount of money coming from other search engines or sponsored bookmarks can’t sustain a browser dev team.
So there are definitely other decent sources of income besides Google for these deals and since it's a significantly more focused organization it doesn't seem implausible to me.
But here's why there's confusion. Yahoo search at the time (or shortly before or after) switched to using Bing's search and ad engine.
As I said, there are definitely other decent sources of income besides Google for these deals and since it's a significantly more focused organization it doesn't seem implausible to me.
The browser's market share will ultimately determine the market value of the search partnership, so Vivaldi will likely have a much lower income from it than Firefox, but it's in no way limited by whether they partner with Google or with any other search provider. For a smaller more efficient team, not maintaining their own browser engine, it could easily compare in sustainability to Firefox's income stream.
That being said, according to their blog, browser users aren't tracked or profiled by Vivaldi.
They claim to make money from search engine partner deals and from bookmark partner deals. And to be honest, I have no reason to think that the statement isn't true.