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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

Despite not being open source, I appreciate that Vivaldi lets you customize its UI and behavior to a reasonable degree. It's the closest thing we have a browser for power users, unlike Chrome and Firefox who actively remove useful options and features in an effort to cater to the lowest common denominator (passive content consumers).

The built-in mail and calendar functionality looks very nice and I'm definitely interested in trying them out.

The main thing I disliked about Vivaldi when I tried it last was that a lot of websites actively try to prevent automatic saving and filling of passwords, against all reasonable logic. Firefox is much better at skirting those efforts, Chrome-based browsers, not so much. Has Vivaldi improved in this regard lately? (Or is there an extension that can help with this?)

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Regarding the open source part, Jon has spoken about it on a podcast from last year[0][1]. Basically the only think keeping them from full open-source is the license which they think would make the company possibly fall to another competitor. It's hard being a small business, this makes sense to me. They actively encourage modding of the browser too.

I'm not sure regarding the prevention of automatic saving/filling. I use Bitwarden and in my time using Vivaldi, I haven't had any issues, though maybe someone in the Vivaldi forums[2] would know?

[0]: YouTube link: https://youtu.be/ivDiL9XeDw0?t=3410 [1]: Podcast website: https://destinationlinux.org/episode-243/ [2]: https://forum.vivaldi.net/

Why not use AGPL for the UI code?

That doesn't stop someone from using your code to build a compelling competitor product. It just means you need to pay more lawyers to argue about whether the AGPL was violated or not and maybe win a lawsuit.

But the added value of the company is perfect execution of the idea, not juste the idea. The code being open source only means other people can try to be better, but it shouldn't be the number one issue.

GitLab took libgit vom GitHub, didn't they?

I would say use bitwarden rather than the built in password managers of these browsers, it does a pretty good job and you aren't tied to one browser.

A security researcher made a strong case against this advice. Injection of privileged components into the browser sandbox as well as opening you up to a lot of IPC vulnerabilities.

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/passmgrs.html

Is that relevant to Bitwarden? At least the first vulnerability in the article does not appear to apply to Bitwarden for me here, I'm not currently able to test the other two.

if you use the browser extension and turn autofill on it applies to Bitwarden as well. If you use the desktop version or an alternative like Keepass, which Tavis suggests, it's not an issue.

Ahh that's it, I'm not using autofill.

Ditto! Set up keyboard shortcuts (or in some use case cases), I let Bitwarden fill up credentials automatically. Miles ahead of 1Password (and their toxic optimism)

Of course they cater to those awful “passive content consumers”; they need their online bank much more than you need your tiling tabs.

I never had this problem. Using vivaldi full time, it remembers all the passwords (plus my home address and phone number for registering new accounts on shopping sites).

In regards UI customisation is there anything like Pentadactyl?

>Vivaldi lets you customize its UI

But still nowhere close to userChrome.css that Firefos has.

>The built-in mail and calendar functionality looks very nice

But does having that functionality built-in rather as extensions offer any advantages?

> But still nowhere close to userChrome.css that Firefos has.

Dunno where are you getting that from, Vivaldi has official support for CSS Mods and unofficial support for JS Mods

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