I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox 😇

jamesbeardmore

@Stardust I notice you asked me if V was faster rendering or in general UI, and also if I was really sure that V was more private.

Regarding "speed", on a single-core 800MHz 32-bit netbook with 2GB RAM, running Devuan Beowulf, where I'd expect any differences in performance to be amplified significantly, I'd say Vivaldi is faster at rendering web pages, and that the general responsiveness of the GUI is exactly the same as Firefox - opening new tabs, navigating menus etc. The only area Firefox is noticeably faster is the initial loading of the browser.

Regarding privacy I can see your point and I am actually undecided myself as to whether I stand by what I said or agree with you. Let me present what little I've managed to determine: - a stock Firefox (especially non-ESR) makes dozens of unsolicited connections on startup and many more when you simply just interact with the interface (e.g. clicking menus). A small number of these are related to things like auto-updates and safebrowsing, but many seem to be to do with telemetry, "studies" and "experiments", based on the settings that (appear to) shut them up. Vivaldi, on the other hand, seems to just ping Vivaldi's servers on startup and then ping the various Goggle services it uses, such as the safebrowsing list and extension store. All these connections in Vivaldi can be minimised, but not completely eliminated, from the regular settings dialogue. After disabling whatever I can, Vivaldi still periodically pings the Vivaldi servers every once in a while. In contrast, reducing Firefox's chattiness the same amount (or even completely shutting-up Firefox), requires disabling various things in the settings dialogue, followed by disabling dozens of other options within "about:config". Some of these have counterintuitive names such as "normandy", "asrouter", "mstone" or "someopaqueterm.telemetry.randomjargon". Sometimes the name of these options doesn't make it clear whether setting to "true" or "false" actually disables the offending option, and there doesn't seem to be a standard convention regarding similar options. Sometimes it takes the form "spyware.enabled" which you set to false, or "spyware.disablespying", which you set to true!

I haven't studied them both in enough detail or for long enough, but from a brief cursory inspection it looks like out of the box, V contacts more Goggle servers but Firefox does a lot more unsolicited phoning-home in general. Taking just the standard settings dialogues in to account, there's not much to choose from but Vivaldi appeared to be a bit easier to shut-up and the end result was V making less unsolicited connections than Firefox. After fiddling with about:config I think I managed to completely silence Firefox - but without longer and more thorough testing, you can never be sure. Also, in practise I allow both browsers to auto-update themselves and their extensions, so there will always be some background connections occurring.

So Firefox definitely has a greater privacy potential over all, but V appeared to actually be slightly better-behaved both out-of-the-box and after solely GUI-based tweaking. That said, it also depends on who you trust the least - e.g. do you feel safer having 5 connections to various Mozilla-operated servers, or 2 to Goggle-operated servers? So based on how you interpret it, you could argue that just what I've presented demonstrates either browser being "more" private than the other.

On the theme of unsolicited connections and other browsers, I actually really like the Otter browser - it's basically attempting exactly what Vivaldi is also trying to achieve (i.e. be what Opera would have become, had it not turned to the dark side). I also haven't observed it make a single unsolicited connection anywhere. Unfortunately, the project is grossly-underresourced and as a result the browser has lots of quirks and bugs, and really struggles to render much of the web.

jamesbeardmore

@guigirl said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

@Stardust said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

don't like the default Firefox look

Heehee. Last night i chose to reinstall Pale Moon for giggles. Once launched i was violently thrust right back in my chair by the visual assault. I'd really forgotten how ugly & old-fashioned the PM UI is. Ugh.

I sympathise with you - it renders absolutely horribly in non-Losedows environments because in Losedows it can replace the title bar like Crummy-um does, and make everything a bit smoother and more compact. On real computers it uses your standard title bar and then cobbles together the rest of its interface below that using, presumably, some archaic version of GTK that archaeologists had previously thought lost.

Fortunately, your experience is what the themes are for. PM doesn't look very nice when rendered with the standard operating-system widgets, but it's not too bad if you use something like the "new moon" persona/theme/whatever-they're-called.

I'm a fan of them building it and trying to prevent a browser monoculture (or duopoly), and a lot of their project's goals, but I now shy away from using it after the attitude they displayed towards a handful of volunteers who were just trying to see if they could port it to BSD. You want the people who build your window to the internet to display integrity and professionalism in everything they do, as you're trusting them with a lot.

One thing I love about Firefox is I can skin it. I tend to use a forest or mountains theme. I'd love it if there was a similar option in Vivaldi but IMHO its interface already looks good just set to dark.

nomadic

@Stardust @guigirl might have stumbled upon how the zoom controls were moved.

https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/258995
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/307738

Of course it was @LonM and @tam710562, so many clever mods out of those two.

Stardust

@guigirl said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

And here's using Console, but coming up empty [if i have done this check correctly]:

Try Firefox DevTools

jamesbeardmore

@guigirl said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

With respect, i feel i need to partially disagree with your quoted statements, albeit slightly pedantically -- you have characterised "privacy" to equate with "chattiness". I disagree with that. For me, "chattiness" is a subset of "privacy" ... an important subset clearly, but nonetheless a subset not the whole category.

I wholeheartedly agree with you - I just wasn't particularly clear in my wording. I was hinting at your extremely important distinction (I don't think it's pedantic at all, it's really important), when I mentioned the hypothetical situation of whether you feel safer with 5 connections to Mozilla or 2 to Goggle - and in fact that's one raeson why I was unsure whether I still stood by my original assertion.

If we assume that V and Moz are both trustworthy, and measure privacy simply as the inverse of something like (bytes sent to G/time) or (connection requests to G/time), this renders my initial mention of total overall "chattiness" less relevant and FF seems to be the winner from my very limited testing, consistent with what I understand to be both your view and Stardust's.

Of course thinking about it, the situation's so complex it makes my head want to explode... This all ignores other connections you might want/need (e.g. the anti-tracking blocklists, and whether you trust the various list producers). FF is also capable of a higher degree of protection against 3rd party tracking by the web sites you visit, which could be considered a much greater threat to our privacy than e.g. whether Mozilla knows I favour keyboard shortcuts as I haven't been able to find most simple browser options quickly since they switched the menu-bar to a "hamburger" style menu.

Stardust

@guigirl said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

@Stardust said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

Time to update! Thanks for the reminder!

Fwiw, read all the comments. The peeps are Not Happy with the new UI. I agree with them.

Yeah, I updated it yesterday.

Pros:

address bar selection not ugly anymore

alt text

tabs in compact mode are okay (but only in compact mode)
all pinned sites on the "Start Page" now have favicons

Cons:

drop-down bookmark menu is not compact anymore, and now I have to scroll through all my bookmarks folders
compact mode is removed from the UI, very bad sign
add bookmark menu is ugly and glitches
default look is terrible
telemetry settings are enabled by default

I like how in Vivaldi I can disable tab close buttons but not in Firefox. This option was removed many years ago, first from the UI settings and then from about:config. I remember they were suggesting to use an addon (Why should I use a 3rd party addon from some untrusted developer?) And where is that addon now?
The option is gone forever!
Compact mode is the next to vanish...

Stardust

@guigirl said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

login to a Wayland session

Why don't you use Wayland?

Eggcorn

@Stardust To say that I "like Firefox" might be too strong a statement. But if Vivaldi were to disappear tomorrow, I might move onto Firefox. Firefox could fairly be called "Vivaldi lite". But seeing as I have Vivaldi, I almost never use Firefox.

Stardust

@Eggcorn said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

But if Vivaldi were to disappear tomorrow, I might move onto Firefox.

That's what I did when Opera [Presto] disappeared many years ago
Firefox is our only option :smiling_face_with_open_mouth:

npro

@guigirl Hah, thanks for the invite. How did this thread with this wonderful title escape me!? Thanks for the suggestions, I can see already familiar names and I'll keep it for reference.

P.S.1 I can see the thread is "juicy" as well
P.S.2 @guigirl said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

However, tonight, it instead caused me to solidify a nascent thought of a few weeks' consideration...
sudo pacman -Rns vivaldi vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs

you did it???? :faints:

npro

@guigirl said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

Yeah but that was only Stable. Naturally Snapshot remains installed.

Bah psychological talk is so mean! I deleted it.

Catweazle

@guigirl , I use Lemmy, I don't like Reddit
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Catweazle

@guigirl , animation for what I gave you a like, and no, I don't disagree with you. It was a simple suggestion of a site, where you can find also contents of your interests and where you can take a look without to log in.
I am not a FOSS taliban (remember, I use Windoz and Vivaldi also isn't FOSS), but, if exist, I prefer OpenSource, if not, well, the best alternative in privacy and TOS.
See my Blog, you'll find good online apps, non of them OSS.
Please don't get me wrong.
By the way, I have an account on Reddit, I just don't like it very much.

Stardust

@guigirl said in I cheat on Vivaldi with Firefox :

I promise you'll not be happy if you ignore this or slip-up.

newscpq

As long as you you'll say 10 Ave Maria and 10 Pater Noster, you won't go to hell...

npro

lol! OK, we 're doomed...

oh well it was nice while it lasted, I'm going to check again that list of text-browsers...

Catweazle

@npro , Lynx works fine

npro

@catweazle I'm more interested in those

https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/471193

nyxt in particular

Catweazle

@npro , Lynx enter in the same category, surf with shabby system

Catweazle

@gwen-dragon