Vivaldi Replaces Firefox as the Default Browser on Manjaro Linux Cinnamon
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https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/c/ch...
The Firefox's interface is getting worse and worse and it does not seem to be doing anything to protect the users privacy.
It probably says more about me, but I spent a good 20 minutes last night trying (and failing) to work out how to remove the recently-added 'Firefox Suggest' line in the Address bar drop down when you enter a character and it starts to filter options from history, etc.
It's a stupid wee thing, but I don't need it, don't want it. It's just clutter, and besides it's not 'Firefox Suggests' it's my bloody history! Get out.
Firefox has the same marketshare as samsung browser. Nosalgia wont save it. Chromium and its derivatives is just the standard client for the web, like linux is on the backend, the sooner everyone comes to terms with that the better.
If you can argue why a certain firefox approach is inheirently better and not even possible in the chromium ecosystem that is compelling but I have yet to hear of such an argument. For my part it seems like firefox just keeps getting more and more behind.
RAM and battery consumption for one. I would rather use a browser "that keeps getting more and more behind" if it means my battery usage is significantly better on a laptop or 2-in-1.
Web browsers are a surprisingly complex topic. For example, WebKit on iOS is intentionally crippled so that PWAs can't use push notifications, and thus businesses are forced to write apps for the App Store. However, Apple has been telling businesses for years now that their app could otherwise be achieved in a PWA, and regardless of kicking and screaming with an appeal due to needing to use push notifications, they will still reject it.
Is that wrong? Of course. Would everything using Blink or building on top of Chromium solve this? Potentially, but as we all know, Apple doesn't follow standards to the letter.
I do agree with where you're coming from though, and I do agree that standardization would be nice, but the reality is more complex, and there's objective advantages and disadvantages to each, the importance of each being a variable dependent on the user.
Can we trust Vivaldi? Without 100% of its source being available, the answer is dependent upon your threat model and what you intend to use a browser for along with where you live.
Vivaldi has poor feature parity with its mobile apps too.
Recently started using an RPM-based OS as my daily driver (previously Debian->Gentoo->macOS, never ever used anything RPM-based before). I'm mainly terminal-based, so the number of GUI apps I installed is pretty small: FirefoxDevEdition (my main browser), Chrome (needed for cross-browser testing as a web-dev), Slack, Telegram, VSCode. Only one of those posed a problem. The open-source one. The irony of this is pretty embarrassing.
A LOT of this can be put down to the fragmentation of Linux OS package management, and the package repos maintained by individual OSes, but the entire experience has been so bad with Firefox in many ways that can't really be blamed on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL folk, or on the broader Linux community in general.
- Not only do Mozilla not provide any 3rd-party yum repo, they don't even provide RPMs.
- The built-in Firefox updater UI dropdown (with the upgrade now button) triggers but doesn't seem to have considered Linux at all: it's just a no-op. It would be nice if the updater actually worked in Linux (as Chrome's does), but if it's a no-op the UI should at least not be misleading/confusing.
- The updater CLI is largely undocumented, it doesn't autodownload new versions (you must handle that yourself) and it doesn't gracefully handle killing/restarting running processes.
- There is no programmatic way to shutdown the Firefox process gracefully via the Linux cli anyway...
- Firefox puts its user data in "$HOME/.mozilla" instead of being XDG compliant.
If that's Firefox's level of support for what is (surely?) the 2nd biggest Linux packaging format, I wonder what the Manjaro/Pacman experience is like. I get that Arch's systems are generally much simpler, so it might be much better, but still...
I am running fedora, and firefox is in the default repos.
[0] https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=firefox
The mainline Firefox is the default on a few RPM distros, so definitely is included in repos (That said a few of my bullet-points still apply to mainline, particularly around updaters & XDG).
One could definitely argue that this is an edge-case, but... then one wonders who the typical DevEdition user being targetted is.
Chromium is entirely open source.
Chromium is a whole 5 million lines of code and meanwhile the Linux kernel is 30 million. If Chromium ever stops serving the community, we'll just take it over. Chrome itself is absolutely fine with me. I wouldn't use anything else right now and I love only having to test with Chrome and Safari.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what the tiny loud minority of Firefox users think. They've already lost.
Also, your tone about Chromium is precisely going to create another IE. Screw this monoculture of browsers. Chrome did the FLoC fiasco, this is proof they can't be trusted.
FLoC fiasco? You mean a feature you can turn off, that only exists in Chrome and not every browser that uses Chromium?
"Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it..." [0] Gee, it really sounds like Google is in complete control of all other browsers that use Chromium right?
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387492/google-floc-ad-t...
My point is that it should not be something that has to be removed. In fact, I'm vehemently against the idea of it in general. Are we going to start using Chromium with a list of patches to remove all the privacy violations? That's still giving up to the monoculture, though I suppose the privacy violations are assuaged. Why not just use Firefox? Open source?
Please explain why it's better to use Vivaldi. I'm arguing against it, but Manjaro must justify why the FOSS spirit of Manjaro was broken, and what possible benefit (metaphorical, or $$$ literal) would be gained by switching to Vivaldi.
>Gee, it really sounds like Google is in complete control of all other browsers that use Chromium right?
In complete control of Chromium.
And it isn't a feature at all if you use any other Chromium based browser (not Chrome) like Brave, Edge or Vivaldi.
> Please explain why it's better to use Vivaldi.
I didn't say that you should use Vivaldi. Nope. I said that there are plenty of non-Chrome Chromium browsers to use in response to someone saying that there is a "one browser rules all" situation. There's not. There's not even a "one browser-engine to rule them all" situation given that Safari (WebKit) has a very sizable market share.
> In complete control of Chromium.
Yep and Linus Torvalds is in complete control of the Linux kernel, yet we have hundreds of distros that all do things differently.
And it doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Here's Microsoft discussing their decision to not fork Chromium, because they don't have to - "We have chosen not to fork since we don’t want to fragment the community, but our infrastructure does allow us to maintain patches for cases where we have a different point of view on individual changes (we talked about the webRequest/Manifest V3 changes in a couple other places. In general we plan to upstream our web platform improvements to the Chromium project. " [0]
I am referring to the Chromium open source project. Not the derivatives. You can argue that everyone removes it, but that further shows how unwanted it is.
>I said that there are plenty of non-Chrome Chromium browsers to use in response to someone saying that there is a "one browser rules all" situation
I was actually referring to the engine, yeah.
>There's not even a "one browser-engine to rule them all" situation given that Safari (WebKit) has a very sizable market share.
Still very small. Less than 20%? Besides, a majority of that is iOS devices, where this engine is FORCED upon you...
>Yep and Linus Torvalds is in complete control of the Linux kernel, yet we have hundreds of distros that all do things differently.
The difference is the lack of corporate malice, which I classify FLoC under (which was added to Chromium, regardless of whether or not you say others have removed it).
>And it doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Here's Microsoft discussing their decision to not fork Chromium, because they don't have to -
Not particularly sure what you mean here - this is just showing that edge is also contributing to the browser monoculture by still using Chromium and not even forking it. Though I suppose that's a little weak argument because patches are still applied.
Nobody is disagreeing that FLoC is unwanted though. It's a completely irrelevant point. There is no browser monoculture and there is no browser-engine monoculture. We've mentioned 3 engines and at least 5 browsers here. You're arguing that Google is in complete control of Chromium as if that means anything, when every Chromium based browser is not simply dancing to Google's tune.
> Still very small. Less than 20%?
More than Firefox and it absolutely defies your point that there is a monoculture. There is not.
> The difference is the lack of corporate malice...
Yeah it's so malicious that you can turn it right off if you wish to or just use a different browser seeing as how there is no monoculture.
> Not particularly sure what you mean here - this is just showing that edge is also contributing to the browser monoculture...
You keep using that word but I don't think you know what it actually means. There simply is no monoculture, not in browsers and not in browser engines. Sorry to break it to ya, but you're completely wrong on that point and no amount of illogical rationalization will make it true.
And you'd still be wrong. First, because of the definition of the word "monoculture" [0] and secondly because Chrome is only at about 65% [1].
> when I regularly encounter devs who don't bother checking ANYTHING with Firefox?
Sounds about right. I'm one of them and I look forward to Firefox and Mozilla just up and disappearing one day because honestly, it's a dumpster fire of a browser and the culture at Mozilla is simply detestable.
[0] "the cultivation of a SINGLE crop in a given area"
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2021...
Still, I will always take FOSS and properly licensed over Vivaldi.
I tried chrome on linux some years back, and experienced an issue where the browser would crash the os on the extensions search page. Years went by without this being fixed. Firefox would never do that.
I have now switched to it as my default ( am using it now).
Features like auto-closing tabs after X time (days, weeks, months) are things I always wanted but never knew I needed.
See: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/auto-close-open-tabs-fi...
I've integrated that into my personal workflows so tightly that I'd be very unhappy if I had to use a browser without that capability.
Last I checked Chrome(ium) doesn't have it. What about Oper... I mean Vivaldi?
IMO, the 'fabric' of your computational experience, from the kernel to core utilities like your web browser, email client and IM, should all be open source and possible to trust.
Trust, privacy, and security trump gimmicks for a not insignificant number of individuals, and businesses. Vivaldi's USP, in its current state of not being 100% open source, is based upon UX gimmicks.
Is Vivaldi a 'good' browser? That is wholly dependent on your threat model and requirements. Vivaldi is not 'the best tool available' if you are concerned about privacy.
Im not sure how much I care about browsers being proprietary as long as the engine is open source (I really like safari). If there’s evidence that Vivaldi is doing terrible things with my usage data then I’ll likely change back to FF.
[1] https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/vivaldi.html [2] https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/
I have a Manjaro and an Arch Linux machine with me so I can just type "pacman -Qi vivaldi" on both of them and reveal the package's information:
Name : vivaldi
Version : 4.1.2369.21-1
Description : An advanced browser made with the power user in mind.
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://vivaldi.com
[...]
Installed Size : 278,59 MiB
Packager : Ike Devolder <ike.devolder@gmail.com>
[...]
The same result comes out on both machines.
From my point of view, I try FOSS alternatives but if I don't like them... I don't like to spend time changing CSS files or messing with configurations. I spent quite a lot of time doing just that for Pale Moon and then Firefox. These days, I just use closed ones (or none).
But... From the FOSS point of view, Vivaldi is closed source and we shouldn't use it. I keep ungoogled-chromium as an alternative on my desktop devices and Bromite on Android for sensitive stuff (things like banking).
Still, I hope that someday Vivaldi makes its source available. Even if it's mostly a custom Chromium base with a React user interface (and quite complete actually) on top.
I guess my point is, this is kinda par for the course.
[0] https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-freeoffice-manjaro-linux/
The PKGBUILD downloads the source, patches it (if required) and compiles it to create the desired package. If the package is closed source it just downloads the binaries and repackages the result as a Pacman package.
So they can offer both open and closed source editor suites and you're free to install whatever you want. I've tried several office suites and FreeOffice is quite faster than LibreOffice actually. I've also tried one suite which was an electron app (OnlyOffice) and LibreOffice felt faster than a plane compared to it.
[0] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/setup_rpmfus...
(The FreeOffice version included was essentially feature-limited shareware, also requiring registration after 30 days)
I actually played a little with arch recently in a VM. It's actually a quite nice distribution. With arch the whole point seems to be not getting locked into any kind of opinionated defaults for whatever. The gnome desktop I installed comes with a thing simply called Web, which appears to be some Gnome Webkit derivative. I also played with Manjaro, which is a lot simpler to setup. I wouldn't get to hung up on default apps on either of those two platforms. If you install them, you kind of should know what you are doing and what you like.
Firefox still has some use insofar that adblocker blockers don't target it as much.
I'm still gonna stick with Firefox, but Vivaldi is a pretty good browser from what I've tried of it. The only thing I dislike is their leadership: they cited 'Vivaldi's brand' as the reason why they can't go open source, which seems like such a cop-out in my eyes that I switched back to Firefox. That said, browsers are hard to get right, so at the very least, Kudos to the Vivaldi team for being less-terrible than Chrome.
Firefox is coming to an end. The Mozilla mismanagement can't be continued forever, either people start supporting a new browser vendor or Chrome monoculture it will be.
Now talking about browsers since firefox's market share seems directly corrlated to the inverse of their CEOs paycheck, what GOOD options are still out there?
* Chrome - Spyware
* Chromium variations of all kind - Spyware with some mitigations
* Midora, Konquerror, other weird browsers etc. - hopelessly never going to be feature complete enough to be useful
* Firefox - Now with spyware AND woke politics!
* Firefox based privacy remixes like libewolf - current best choice for privacy and reasonable website compatibility.
edit downvote me to oblivion if you must. I too weep for the mozilla of the olden days. The inarguably good guys winnning their fight david vs goliath style against the evil Mircosoft empire. Sadly, those games are gone.
It would be extremely wasteful and privacy-invasive if they issued a query to Safe Browsing for every request.
You know, that's a good question given the threat exposure in a browser.
Maybe the right answer is a mixture. Use a dedicated Chromebook in guest mode for financial transactions/bill paying/banking (high security, low privacy from Google) and something akin to a text-based browser on an open source OS for everything else.
Is there something like Lynx but with a bit of formatting + still images? I can see going that route simply because the sheer size (in LOC) of a modern browser is so great that I question it's trustability.
The part about the chromebook is actually good advice, given the good security hardening of chromebooks from the moment they boot.
Sounds like dillo[0]. eww[1] is also fun, but written in emacs and probably not that trustable for this reason.
[0]: https://www.dillo.org/ [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eww.html
I seriously don’t know how the hell anyone thinks this sort of thing is user friendly or good.
This lack of understanding onboarding and setup UX is the great differentiator from Windows and macOS for most consumers.