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No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.
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@Catweazle said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:
"I think that in general the ads are overvalued, "
Don't let the advertisers hear that!!!
Where else will the ad agency's be able to make a living??? -
@GearDoc47 ,with a decent job, perhaps?
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@jamesbeardmore
Ah, the alternative truth we have heard recently in the USA........ -
@mtrantalainen I think the main use case for faking FloC is to prevent fingerprinting. ( We need to blend in with the flock)
I don’t think websites will be able to block you for having FloC disabled, Trust Tokens, yes, but not FloC.
Changing every second is a bad idea, too fingerprint able.
One cohort for all Vivaldi users could work, but there are only 2 M V users.
The best answers are probably having a random cohort that changes each session, or the empty cohort. The empty cohort is for those whose cohorts would convey sensitive info.
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@jane-n Could you be more specific on what will be disabled? Wouldn’t disabling the FloC API make V users too fingerprintable? Wouldn’t disabling Trust Tokens be a very bad idea?
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It is a no FLoCin way from me also
This post is quoted in The Register https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/14/browser_makers_reject_google_floc/
Also "WordPress core contributor proposes treating Google FLoC as a security vulnerability" https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/19/wordpress_core_contributor_proposes_treating/ -
@code3 Another option would be to take the approach of addons like "blender" (if it still exists), or Firefox's privacy.resistfingerprinting. From what I remember, using either the addon or the option results in you appearing to be running the latest version of the browser on a 64-bit x86 Windows 10 computer, using US English system locale, with only default fonts installed, etc.
Therefore, just set the Floc cohort to be the most common, widely-populated value. Update the value each week to what the biggest single cohort in your region (or simply the world) is that week. Blend in with the masses.
Even taking this approach, I'd still appreciate the option (maybe even default option) to simply not participate in the Floc scam at all. That way you're not just refusing to participate, you're standing-up and being counted, sending the message that you're refusing to participate.
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@jamesbeardmore said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:
addons like "blender"
Does it still exist? I saw an addon that had a blender icon and advertised the same thing, blending in, and right now I am using an addon by the same author that hides the font list from websites, similarly to Tor browser.
@jamesbeardmore said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:
Therefore, just set the Floc cohort to be the most common, widely-populated value. Update the value each week to what the biggest single cohort in your region (or simply the world) is that week. Blend in with the masses.
I think that would be the empty cohort, because it combines multiple cohorts like wheelchair cohort, hospital cohort, victim cohort, together to hide them.
@jamesbeardmore said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:
Even taking this approach, I'd still appreciate the option (maybe even default option) to simply not participate in the Floc scam at all. That way you're not just refusing to participate, you're standing-up and being counted, sending the message that you're refusing to participate.
Should certaintly an option, but not the default until V has a large enough userbase to use its own UA.
Edit: The best solution would probably be combining both solutions: at startup, select one of the top 100 cohorts to spoof.
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@juanvase: What that "crypto token" do anyway?
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@Panino See this most excellent post from user @nomadic :
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/58228/google-extensions-crypto-token-what-it-does -
Steve Gibson talked about Vivaldi's stance on FLoC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zlv-fRWRrM -
Will Vivaldi ever abandon the blink engine for one of their own doing?
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@paulojrmam said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:
Will Vivaldi ever abandon the blink engine for one of their own doing?
That requires a lot of coders, never say never but not in the near future. Make Vivaldi grow by spreading the word so they can earn more and then hire more devs. But you also know what happens when a company gets too big, and when it happens, only earning more money will matter. It's inevitable.
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@paulojrmam Seems unlikely. The Web is hostile to new browser engines.
Back when Vivaldi founder Jon S Von Tetzchner was running Opera SA, he made the mistake of attracting and accepting outside investment funding. The investors eventually gained administrative control of the company.
At the time, Opera had the fastest, lightest and most versatile browser engine in existence, named Presto. Problem was, Opera only had something like a two or three percent share of web usership (numerically vastly more than Vivaldi enjoys this early in its development) and almost no web developers or web engineers took it into account in web development. They did not test in it to ensure their pages were working right. This led to a real compatibility problem between Presto and sites that were built for IE, FF and Chrome. Jon kept hiring additional developers to address the compatibility issues, patch Presto to properly interpret improperly-written sites, etc. But Opera could not keep up with the widening compatibility gap, and could not deal with the fact that thousands of sites deliberately sent Presto bad code and unworking pages.
At this time, Jon's preferred solution was to hire more developers (he had over 200 - like ten times what Vivaldi has now), but the investors wanted to save money, their solution was to dump Presto and select a new, "compatible" browser engine, and so Jon ultimately left the company. Presto was abandoned, and Chromium (ultimately Blink) was adopted as the Opera engine. Problem was, they were not looking to make the best browser now, but to sell the company and make a ton of cash. The rest is history.
Jon gathered a team and launched Vivaldi browser, with the aim to serve the public Opera had abandoned. It would take a decade or better to fully write and deploy a new browser engine, Presto was still owned by Opera and still incompatible with thousands of websites, and Jon had a tiny team. They studied which engine to use, and settled on Blink but with major architectural differences from the way Opera was approaching that adoption of a new engine.
So, Vivaldi. Like the old, classic, Presto Opera, it is uniquely designed, and uniquely flexible. But it is mostly, by default, compatible with the modern web - so a huge team of developers to address the compatibility problem is not needed. But there is also not the time, the economics, nor resources to start all over again building a new and unique browser engine.
I don't think we'll be seeing one.
Volunteer Mod and tester on Windows 11 Home X64, i7-13700 @ 5.4 GHz turbo; Intel UHD 770 graphics; 1TB NV2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD; 32 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Community Code of Conduct
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@paulojrmam said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:
Will Vivaldi ever abandon the blink engine for one of their own doing?
The reason for FloC is not Blink but chromium. When Vivaldi tells you they only use the rendering engine from chromium, they are lying. They use almost the whole entire chromium, and build on top of it. There are a lot more similarities than the rendering engine.
Abandoning Chromium would probably be a bad idea. A better idea would be to build off of ungoogled-chromium.
There is a reason to switch rendering engines - so that web developers do not only test in Blink - but that is probably a lost cause at this point, as Safari is very similar to blink and Gecko (Firefox) has a falling market share (7% or less).
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@code3 Vivaldi does not claim to use Blink. They specify that they use the "Chromium engine" which is a lot more than a web engine and, in fact, by implication, includes V8, the Chromium-affiliated JS engine that is also used in Chrome, and without which much of the web would not work. So when they say Chromium, they mean Chromium+V8+a really, really large number of edits and patches.
Then, of course, there is the unique UI layer that distinguishes Vivaldi.
When I spoke of Opera "ultimately" using Blink above, I was referring to the versions of Chromium that began incorporating the WebCore branch called Blink in 2013. At the time, there was Chromium and Chromium/Blink. Now all Chromium versions incorporate Blink.
Volunteer Mod and tester on Windows 11 Home X64, i7-13700 @ 5.4 GHz turbo; Intel UHD 770 graphics; 1TB NV2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD; 32 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Community Code of Conduct
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@Ayespy Sorry, but this:
we rely on the Chromium engine to render pages correctly, this is where Vivaldi’s similarities with Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers) end.Seems to suggest that they only use chromium for page rendering, though of course that’s not true.
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@Ayespy As a layman, how this Chromium business work, exactly? Is Vivaldi obligated to update whenever a new Chromium version comes out, even when it breaks some things in Vivaldi? Or do they only do it because of security patches? Apparently, Vivaldi can choose what parts of Chromium updates they use and which they don't, since they won't be using FLoC, why they don't do it every time a new update comes out then? And if Chromium is open source, why does it seem that all updates are made by Google? Why not an update made by Microsoft or even Vivaldi? Can Vivaldi stop using Chromium updates and start updating it themselves, maybe based around Chromium's updates, but not always, and this way this fork can gradually steer away from the source?
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@code3 Strictly speaking, you're right. There are a lot of things the Chromium structure is doing in support of browsing that are not strictly speaking "page rendering." Comparatively, however, Vivaldi uses much less of Chromium than other Chromium-based browsers.
