No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.
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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.
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@paulojrmam As another layman (but with some familiarity with how the Chromium/Vivaldi interaction works), Chromium is a web engine with a bunch of associated settings and functions built-in. It is open source, but if you're going to fork it, you'd better have a few hundred developers, designers and engineers handy to maintain it and keep it updated in terms of both security and compatibility with the web.
Although it's open source, there is a huge team at Google directing and monitoring all development, screening and approving/disapproving all commits offered by anyone. It's open source, but it's Google who produces it. They are fairly chary about who they let contribute, and what contributions they allow. That said, you can do anything you want with the code on your own for your own purposes, if you're willing to fly solo, no help or support from Google.
So since the vast majority of browser-users in the world are using Chromium or a flavor of it, Chromium and through it Google is defacto in charge of what is or is not practical web design. If you want your site to work, it has to work in Chromium. At the same time, with their huge team, Google is continually adding security patches and other kinds of updates, so if you want your flavor of Chromium to be secure and up-to-date with what works and doesn't work on the web, if you are smart, you will intake the Chromium updates as they are issued, so as not to fall behind. There's no requirement that you do it, but if you don't, you're a kind of an idiot. 'Cause when it comes to the Web, Google/Chromium is driving the bus.
There are a bunch of Chromium-based browsers out there, who are operating on versions of Chromium that are a year or more old. That mostly means they're insecure, and that there are already some websites they are not entirely compatible with.
Even so, you can alter/patch each and every Chromium update to a fare-thee-well, to suit yourself, if you have the team and the resources to do it. You can have your own completely unique interface, like Vivaldi, you can have your own sync and email servers, like Vivaldi, you can reject all "phone home to the Borg mother ship" functions, like Vivaldi, etc.
So Vivaldi intakes each Chromium update and alters/patches/modifies/enhances it to work with the Vivaldi UI, settings and functions. This takes time, of course, so each Vivaldi version is a few days behind the corresponding Chromium version. Every six weeks or so, like Chromium, a new "official" or "stable" release comes out.
In order to fully fork the engine and go their own way, totally independent of Google, Vivaldi's development team would have to be ten times the size it is, at minimum. There are literally millions of lines of code in the browser, and it's not like a car you can put gas in occasionally, paint or put rims on, and drive around town. It's a living, breathing organism that requires continual care, growth, and maintenance.
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@guigirl Which means you can never drop below 55 mph.
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@paulojrmam said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:
Is Vivaldi obligated to update whenever a new Chromium version comes out, even when it breaks some things in Vivaldi?
No! It is only for security, Google is not forcing them to do it. As Google puts more bad stuff into Chromium, Vivaldi might want to start taking parts from ungoogled-chromium or even Brave, and not just Google.
It is open source and accepts contributions. If Vivaldi have more resources they could contribute to the project.
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All nice and stuff, Vivaldi's stance is crystal clear, not like those of Chropera & Edge.
However, Vivaldi is still missing CNAME blocking in the native ad-blocker -as it can't be enforced with extensions like in Firefox- which lately has forced me to return to Firefox after 5 years.
It pains me returning to the point I was when Chropera abandoned me, but times do change (for the worst) and in my book privacy comes first, then features. And Firefox has improved a lot compared to what it was back then.
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@npro said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:
All nice and stuff, Vivaldi's stance is crystal clear, not like those of Chropera & Edge.
However, Vivaldi is still missing CNAME blocking in the native ad-blocker -as it can't be enforced with extensions like in Firefox- which lately has forced me to return to Firefox after 5 years.
It pains me returning to the point I was when Chropera abandoned me, but times do change (for the worst) and in my book privacy comes first, then features. And Firefox has improved a lot compared to what it was back then.
Until the V devs include CNAME-inspection in their content blocker, you can still protect your V from this type of tracking:
- On PC or anything connected to your home WiFi: Protect your home network with a Pi-Hole. These have performed CNAME inspection for a while now.
- On Android: Go to F-Droid and download PersonalDNSFilter. It's another ad-blocker (works by creating a virtual VPN on your device that filters all traffic). It's the only device-wide adblocker I know of that does CNAME inspection. I don't know if Blokada or DNS66 do it yet, as I haven't used them in a while. The only downside is if you use an actual (real) VPN, you can't use this blocking method.
I've exhibited bad netiquette and necro'd the thread you refer to, to add this information, just in case someone searches the forum for Vivaldi and canonical-name based tracking.
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Can this help? https://git.hackers.town/ONI/WhatCampaign
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You are AWESOME!
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