What’s Vivaldi’s business model? | Hacker News Reader

What’s Vivaldi’s business model?

vivaldi.com

105 pointsvmurthy73 comments

> Some use your data in ad networks, push promoted content or use other invasive methods to fund their development. We don’t.

"We don’t - directly. Instead we make deals with search engines and bookmark partners who's business model is exactly as described above. In other words, we too live off you data, but we outsource the hard lifting to our partners. "

Vivaldi is my default chromium based browser right now. Firefox still be the default browser, however there are many site offering extra features for Chrome based browser. For example the video filter in Google meet doesn't work on Firefox.

The amount of customization is no joke, i love this feeling of being truly power user.

Mine too. I think it's great. So many quality of life improvements. For starters, all the tab handling options. Being able to specify where new tabs open, and where you go when you close a tab. Tab stacks are amazing — five minutes after learning how they work, I was already wondering how I'd managed for so long without them. Being able to tile multiple tabs in the same window. The list goes on and on. The neat, compact interface. The sidebar that gives you a searchable list of closed tabs. Smaller things, like being able to see the entire URL in the address bar again.

There are a few rough edges here and there, and it certainly doesn't feel as responsive as Chrome, but I highly recommend it nevertheless, especially to those who get frustrated with the main players removing more and more features with each new version.

I'm on the same boat. The only reason FF is still my main browser is because of multi account containers. If Vivaldi implemented that I'd switch instantly.

>at Vivaldi, we don’t track or profile you. Nor do we collect usage data. In fact, we believe that the unnecessary collection of data is dangerous and has no place in your browser.

Great. Would be better if you also release Vivaldi's source code to public scrutiny instead of just expecting users to take your word for it.

If you just need public scrutiny, then Vivaldi's code is already open for you at https://vivaldi.com/source/. On top of that code is the HTML/JS UI, which can be found at least on macOS inside the Vivaldi.app package, though minified.

Then I hope you'll also build it by yourself.

Most software I use is not built and packaged by the person who wrote it.

Vivaldi is however, as large parts of it are proprietary.

Ah yes, parent was saying that he hopes you'll build yourself if source is released in response to grandparent asking for sourcecode. So if it'd go open-source I still wouldn't be building it myself.

If its open source then packagers will do the job for me

They could support reproducible builds, then any third party could verify the binary they distribute hasn't been monkeyed with.

There is almost certainly one package maintainer out there who would love to do that ;)

I've tried Vivaldi on all my devices for several months but it has several annoying quirks:

- Videos are jerky compared to Chrome. It doesn't matter if hardware acceleration is on or off, and it's at least on macOs and Windows.

- Scrolling is either slow (if hardware acceleration is off) or shows a blank page as you scroll (if hardware acceleration is on). Chrome works fine with hardware acceleration.

- Caching is weird. Often it would show me an old version of a page, and I have to refresh to get the latest version. For example at some point it shown me a version of a Docker Hub page that was 2 months old. The same often happens on GitHub too (I think it has something to do with caching pages that are fetched via JS). Happens on both mobile and desktop. Never seen this problem on Chrome.

As a result I just went back to Chrome. I don't like the tracking and all, but at the end of the day I need basic features like loading pages, playing videos or scrolling to work. In fact, I'm surprised they don't simply try to use Chromimum more closely - they probably add a layer of "optimisations" which only creates more bugs than it's worth.

The worst one for me is the lack of visual feedback after clicking on a link. It makes me question whether I clicked properly and leads me to click again.

I've had the same issues along with it being a big drain on my laptop battery life.

Also it doesn't support touchpad gestures for forward and back navigation which as tiny of a hill that may seem to some is one I'm willing to die upon.

There is something about this browser. I've been trying to use it as the main browser since it's first launched, but it always feel kind of janky. Can't remember the specifics since last I tried was circa 2019.

They rewrote the entire interface of chrome in JavaScript with obvious consequences.

FF is my default but I'd likely fall back to Vivaldi if FF continue with schemes like ads in search suggestions (or more to the point, start making a 3rd party call which apparently they currently don't do).

Appreciate the transparency in that their search engine selection is based on them being paid, and include Google purely because it's the market leader.

Been using Vivaldi more and more on Android these days.

Since the big update Firefox is literally unusable for some tasks. For example the other day I needed to switch apps to get a value to put into a form. When I switched back it reloaded the page, losing the form state.

Yep, Firefox android is impossible to use if you do anything non-trivial and has so many quirks. It's been over a year since the rewrite so I don't know what they're doing.

This has not been my experience. Firefox Android is perfectly functional, fast, and blocks ads too.

It's "functional" but has too many caveats that make it a pain to use on a daily basis. Like, tabs don't update while in the background, it keeps killing tabs after some time, scrolling on some sites is a mess because the navbar gets fucked and starts covering half the page for some reason, when certain HTML elements are too close to a hyperlink you can't click on them, etc. These are all things that worked fine on version 68 and before.

I use FF on Android and don't suffer any of the things you mentioned and have used it on multi android versions on multi android devices.

I wonder if it's the amount of memory on my phone then. The thing is, the old version of FF didn't do this, and neither does the current version of Vivaldi.

How many tabs are you using?

Not that many.

But it's not something that I'm doing specifically for Firefox, my style is to close tabs after I'm finished with them.

Vivaldi's business model was primarily Patreon.

He also had a steady side hustle teaching music and composing for the local orphanage's renowned orchestra and choir. #SoPure

Vivaldi first went viral with his album "The Harmonic Inspiration." He'd regularly dedicate his content to his top-tier subscribers, among them celebrities and members of the 1%. His best-known work, the chart-topping "Four Seasons," is considered classic even to this day.

@TheRedPriest (as Vivaldi was known) was censored for airing LGBT content and was cancelled by his employer; luckily both situations were quickly reversed in his favor.

While Vivaldi undoubtedly became an influencer (of J.S. Bach in particular), during his life he often wasn't trending with the right demographics. One time he had to sell NFT-equivalents of his work at the market low just to move back to Vienna. Shortly thereafter his lead investor got cold feet and went belly up; without financial support, Vivaldi soon died poor.

Edit: whoops name collision my bad.

Vivaldi's business plan: Become a priest and violin virtuoso. Teach music at an orphanage. Compose hundreds of excellent musical pieces from concertos to operas to oratorios. Gain powerful and wealthy patrons and celebrity, then die in poverty after musical tastes change, remain forgotten for hundreds of years, and be rediscovered to grand acclaim!

Counterpoint: "Vivaldi didn't write 500 concertos - he wrote the same concerto 500 times!" (repeated by the less-prolific Igor Stravinsky, composer of the "Riot of Spring" and other works; Stravinsky famously described his own fans as "very naïve and stupid people.")

You haven't told us whether Google was involved

I don't really know Vivaldi. They mention that they do not track you, but do they make some effort to avoid being tracked by others?

For example: firefox reduces the timestamp precision on your mouse events to prevent fingerprinting

Does Vivaldi do something similar?

Vivaldi is pretty pro-privacy. Every time Chromium adds a new API with privacy implications, Vivaldi makes a blog post publicly committing to disable or remove it from the version they ship. E.g. the most recent update, the headline feature is disabling the Idle API by default: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-gets-more-private-delivers-...

They also had a pretty long post about why FLOC is bad, and I believe have committed to retaining Manifest v2 for extensions.

Other prominent privacy or privacy-adjacent features include a built-in ad-blocker and heavy investment into on-device translation features.

I'm not sure how much work they put into preventing fingerprinting techniques. I don't get the sense it's a high priority.

Sadly, as long as they are closed source, there is no way to check their privacy guarantee.

You can find the source at https://vivaldi.com/source/ and in addition to that is the HTML/JS UI which can be found in the installed browser data (though as minified JS files).

Yep, they have built in ad and tracking protection enabled by default.

I don't know but firefox sends what ever you type in your address bar to mozilla, that is concerning

Not really true - you can see my post for details https://www.quippd.com/writing/2021/10/10/firefox-suggest-an...

> For example: firefox reduces the timestamp precision on your mouse events to prevent fingerprinting

... while sending all URLs you visit to google for "safe browsing".

It's kind of gray:

Privacy

One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe.

While this was an option in version 1 of the Safe Browsing protocol (as disclosed in their privacy policy at the time), support for this "enhanced mode" was removed in Firefox 3 and the version 1 server was decommissioned in late 2011 in favor of version 2 of the Safe Browsing API which doesn't offer this type of real-time lookup.

Google explicitly states that the information collected as part of operating the Safe Browsing service "is only used to flag malicious activity and is never used anywhere else at Google" and that "Safe Browsing requests won't be associated with your Google Account". In addition, Firefox adds a few privacy protections:

    Query string parameters are stripped from URLs we check as part of the download protection feature.
    Cookies set by the Safe Browsing servers to protect the service from abuse are stored in a separate cookie jar so that they are not mixed with regular browsing/session cookies.
    When requesting complete hashes for a 32-bit prefix, Firefox throws in a number of extra "noise" entries to obfuscate the original URL further.

On balance, we believe that most users will want to keep Safe Browsing enabled, but we also make it easy for users with particular needs to turn it off.

So basically, it does send your URLs to Google. Maybe not all of them, but an unspecified amount of them. Also, Google pinky promises that the data they collect from this isn't used for tracking purposes.

> So basically, it does send your URLs to Google

No, it downloads hashes from Google, and checks the URL locally against those.

See https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

Thanks for the link, that explains it much better than the snippet in the post I replied to.

It seems like it actually is way more private than I thought. FF downloads the database of flagged sites from Google and stores it locally (only partial hashes of URLs though). Only when a match is detected in the local database, FF sends the full hash of the URL to Google to double check, since the local database only has partial hashes to save space (so false positives are likely). It also apparently sends extra noise as part of the payload, so that the request isn't obviously tied to a single URL (in case Google is able to reverse the hash to track your browsing habits, or something like that)

That sounds pretty private to me. A side-by-side comparison of this implementation to the one in Chromium would be interesting. I wonder if browsers like Vivaldi go the extra mile like FF does?

(not: that post is over 5 years old, so it's possible that the implementation may have changed since then)

> Only when a match is detected in the local database, FF sends the full hash of the URL to Google to double check

Even that's not quite what it says, as I understand things. When a partial-hash match is detected, FF asks Google for the list of full hashes that start with this partial hash, and then checks (still locally) against those. So as far as I can see, Google still wouldn't know which of those full hashes corresponds to the URL you're requesting.

(I have not examined the implementation personally, I'm just basing this off the post mentioned. But FF is open source, so if someone would like to check whether this is accurate, that'd be great.)

I thought that they downloaded the list and checked locally (ref https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...). Has this been changed recently?

Firefox fetches URLs hashes from Google and then checks the URLs you visit against that list. Only if there is a match Firefox will send the hash(not the URL) to Google to verify that there isn't a hash conflict.

Does it happen even if Google isn't the default search engine? If yes, where do I disable it?

Depending on your answer, this might be the last straw in my relationship with FF.

I don't believe the claim was at all accurate; see the other responses about how Safe Browsing works.

Don't spread FUD.

I disable that feature even though I don't think that they send every URLs for this purpose.

I always find it funny when they accuse people who point out glaring flaws and obvious truths of whataboutism. People should freely point out incongruences and hypocrisy. There is no better way to fix things, or at least to be buyer aware.

Been a Vivaldi user for quite some time now, a number of years, and I love it. It has so many nice features without needing to install lots of extensions.

Business model is letting Google do all the work.

Totally understand everyone adopting Chromium instead of doing the hard work.

This really is the issue with all these Chrome clones - as nice as they might end up being, they keep Google steadily in control of the real thing underneath. The price of outsourcing development of your backbone components is a fundamental loss of power.

Now that Chromium doesn't allow bookmark sync, Vivaldi is one way to get a very Googly browser without going to Chrome.

> The only exception is Google – we don’t make money when you search with Google. However, we know that some of you use this search engine daily, so we include it in Vivaldi.

Interesting. I immediately wondered how Vivaldi can fund development of their browser without Google bucks, but I suppose that might have something to do with why they switched to Chromium.

All these browser company talking about privacy and tracking, all the while letting Google dictate the development of their browser, is really laughable.

No thanks. Not basing on Chrome should be the default if they truly care about such things

The fact that it's closed source doesn't help either

I've been using Vivaldi for over a year and I am very happy with it. To the point that I find FF inferior when I use it on my old linux machine. I love the customization offered.

Thank you for the product

I still use and like Opera. Vivaldi feels a bit bloated. On the other hand, some features of Vivaldi are really cool (RSS, mail client).

I used to like Opera for the built-in mail client but had always used Firefox out of principal. I've grown weary of FF's shenanigans and once I discovered Vivaldi had a mail/rss/calendar/notes built-in I jumped on it and I can't see myself using anything else, ever. I like having everything all in one monolithic app.

Yeah, agree. What I like in the current installment of Opera are its built-in WhatsApp, Telegram clients.

I hope somebody starts a project to do all Vivaldi's customizations but based on firefox.

He worked at a Venetian convent and directed a girls’ choir.

vivaldi and brave are competing for the same set of users...

i currently use and am happy with brave...

hopefully both do well...

This is pretty true. I currently use Brave as my personal browser and use Vivaldi for work. Been doing this for at least a year and am very satisfied.

I've been trying to think about whether this is good enough for me to move to Vivaldi. I wish they offered a direct plan where I'd pay per month to use a browser with no ads, no telemetry, etc. The incentives would be aligned and there'd be no weaselry with them loading up new releases with bookmarks populated with their sponsors or whatever, and me deleting them.

Vivaldi adds a new sponsor bookmark around every six months.

Tldr; we don’t make money

This is plain wrong, as the article clearly lists all the ways Vivaldi makes money

Did you "really" read it? How much money do you think they make from bookmarks or recommendations?

You can make quite substantial sums, seeing as Mozilla makes tens of millions with default engine choices: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2006-audi...

So yes, I do think they make money aswell

I was going give Mozilla as an example, thanks for pointing that out. Now please go and check how Mozilla is doing financially :) Even Mozilla is having hard time making profit, Vivaldi is sure is an ambitious project but my point is sorts of income mentioned on the site doesn't mean anything, they need more than bookmarks...

Mozilla is BATHING in money.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

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