How does Vivaldi's privacy compare with ungoogled chromium browser

blackweta

ungoogled chromium is chromium without the noisy talk back to google chatter
see https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

I'm wondering if Vivaldi compares favourably similar?
#chromium #privacy

Ayespy

@blackweta From what I understand, it should be the same.

blackweta

@ayespy Thanks! I'm swapping to Vivaldi then!

QuHno

@blackweta Asking the question gives a hint that you probably did not look at the changes they have made - not meaning reading the description but looking in the source, neither did assumed 99.9% of all users here - including me. Furthermore I assume that you don't plan to build that the github project from source - which again you would have in common with me - so take the following with a grain of salt.

First impression after reading the description:
It contains some interesting extra features that might enhance privacy, but some seem to be just changes "because" - nice to have but not much more.

... but (there is always a but ) ...

... all of the changes (and they replaced some stuff with other things) are quite probably not well tested.
This is a real problem because he ease of use makes us forget that modern Browsers are hellishly complicated things.
I see every day with the internal Vivaldi snapshots that even small changes to the code can cause serious regressions. Sometimes stuff breaks that seems to be totally unrelated. That is the reason why Vivaldi has to pass a whole bunch of automated tests before it is even handed out to the human testers, and the reason why not only the full time employed testers check it, but a whole lot of external testers like me too, simply to get even more tests - and still sometimes regressions sneak into the snapshots, luckily mostly UI regressions because security has extra people who go through the code with a fine toothed comb. Then all changes get some extra coverage by the public snapshots and finally everything that does not break stuff gets cherry picked for the stable versions.

I highly doubt that the github project gets more than a cursory test in comparison to Vivaldi, where each and every change goes through a series of tests and even more tests.

With regards of ungoogling Vivaldi is on the same level as the github project - some of the stuff the github project introduces as command line parameters is even in the normal Vivaldi settings, which makes changing them more accessible.
Maybe some of the extra privacy features (from the description I doubt the real world value of some of them) are not in Vivaldi, but despite that I would not touch the binaries.
They are outdated and with almost certainty contain a bunch of security holes because back porting the security patches does not seem to happen. The build scripts pull from the recent sources and such is less a problem, but caveat because of the changes they made - those might rip some new holes - and privacy does not exist anymore after you have caught some malware.

Conclusion:
If you can successfully build the binaries from the recent source:
Go for it and check them out - but for everyday use I personally would still prefer Vivaldi, simply because it is better tested

FutureProof

@QuHno @blackweta @Ayespy -- This is of interest... How much of ungoogled-chromium is in Vivaldi? Furthermore, if Vivaldi does not have any change that ungoogled-chromium has (with respect to chromium), then why?

QuHno

@FutureProof If you disable all Googly stuff in the settings it does not send any data to Google apart if you use their Extension store, then it sends the usual queries for updates.

If you enable any google service it does send data, but with exceptions, i.e. the abusive ad blocking, where Vivaldi (the company) fetches the blocklists and delivers them from their own servers, which others can't do because usually the ungoogled chromiums do not have their own servers for that.

Even if you enable some of the Google services like Phishing and Malware protection, Vivaldi sends only as much data as absolutely needed and caches it for some time - which works in a way that Google cannot correlate the data with your browsing behavior. Yngve (security expert at Vivaldi) explained ~~somewhere here in the forum how it works, but I am too lazy to search now~~ it in this post: https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/177280

... other than that: None from that repositorium, because Vivaldi is in many regards different and therefore the Developers prefer to make their own patches.

Komposten

@QuHno said in How does Vivaldi's privacy compare with ungoogled chromium browser:

Even if you enable some of the Google services like Phishing and Malware protection, Vivaldi sends only as much data as absolutely needed

To expand a bit on this: It sends parts of a hash of the URL to Google, and Google responds with a list of blocked URLs that have that same hash part. So Google doesn't even receive any useful information in that case.