Open Source
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OpenSource is important, it allows collaboration in the development of new products and their improvement, but in a product in a market already more than saturated with this product, as in the case of a browser, with already around 100(!) different ones available and another 70 that have already been discontinued along the way, the meaning of OpenSource has become quite debatable.
Adding that, since large corporations like Google, Microsoft and others have appropriated OpenSource even in its distribution (GitHub is from Microsoft, Google code....), and many products that contain their tracking APIs (which are also OpenSource), the original value of OpenSource has been quite distorted. The only advantage that remains is that everyone is free to modify these products to their needs, deleting these APIs that track the user, as is the case with Chromium, which is 100% OpenSource, but it is certainly not recommended to use it as is. without gutting all Google's anti-privacy APIs first, which Vivaldi already does.
The only part of Vivaldi that is proprietary is 5% of the script corresponding to its only UI, which is also fully auditable and even modifiable by the user (here in the forum it is taught how to do it). Even Firefox isn't fully OpenSource, same as any other advanced browsers with extra features, eg the translator, Lingvanex used by FF and Vivaldi, Lingvanex is proprietary soft, same as some other extra functions they hmay have. Also Brave, supposed OpenSource, in it's TOS make clear that it refers to the executable part, with different licenses that are not so free in its extra features.
In the case of browsers, being OpenSource or not, at this point has become quite irrelevant, ethics regarding the user and the transparency of the company matter much more, which in the case of Vivaldi is more than guaranteed.
>Laptop ACER, AMD Ryzen, GPU AMD Radeon RAM 16GB, SSD 512GB -Win11 Home 64 v24H2| Vivaldi last stable|
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@DonnyTinyHands
You've already made it this far.
You already seem to be interested in Vivaldi.Take a closer look at him.
Nobody sees it here.
And maybe read up a bit on the background.
Why Vivaldi is not 100% Open Source will be a recurring topic here.So, now have pleasure while trying something out.
I think you'll be impressed.
Maybe we'll hear from you again.
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@ingolftopf You have just a little bit of that out of order. Jon (and a friend who passed from cancer 'way too early) founded Opera and built it into a browser (user-centric and feature-rich), advertising and embedded software company with over 57 million users and a very healthy income. Along the way he brought in some investors to help with the company's expansion. He developed Presto, a unique, fast and flexible browser engine.
Eventually, patching and refactoring Presto to keep Opera compatible with websites built only for MS, Mozilla and Google browser engines became a Herculean task and Jon wanted to hire more developers to work on the browser core to keep Presto competitive. The investors disagreed and wanted to drop Presto for a pre-baked browser engine and downsize to be "more profitable" and make Opera more attractive to sell. They were investors after all, and wanted only to make money off the company.The differences became irreconcilable and Jon left Opera on June 30 2011, selling his ownership share to the other owners of the company. In May 2013, Webkit Opera came out. The first "stable" Webkit Opera was released Jul 2 2013. Jon had been gone from Opera for over two years. It was not until 2016 that the investors realized their dream of cashing out from Opera by selling to a Chinese conglomerate. By then, Jon was gone for five years.
Jon and Tatsuki Tomita had formed Vivaldi technologies in 2013, and they put up the Vivaldi Forums to replace the MyOpera community that Opera had abandoned. Many community members migrated to Vivaldi Forums. By 2014, it became obvious to Jon that Opera had abandoned the user-centric feature-rich model of browser and he and Tatsuki decided to build a browser to honor the user-centric feature-rich ideal, and they pulled together a team and started that work. January 27 2015, the first technical preview was released. On that day I installed Vivaldi and joined the community. Soon, I quit using Opera and switched to Vivaldi as my default.
So the order of things was, Jon attracted investors, he and the investors diverged over their visions for the company, Jon left Opera with some money for his ownership share, Opera adopted the Webkit engine and abandoned Presto, Jon and Tatsuki put together Vivaldi Technologies, eventually they started building their own browser, then Opera sold out to the Chinese. Jon did not sell out to the Chinese. It's the last thing he would have wanted to do. And Vivaldi was already a viable publicly-used browser before that sale ever occurred.
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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@DonnyTinyHands
A good recommendation are also the open source messengers [Matrix], 'SimpleX', 'Jabber/XMPP', 'Briar', 'Jitsi Meet', for Android from 'F-Droid'.
There are also genuine 100% open source browsers. Maybe you're already using one of them.
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@Ayespy
I only gave him the short version.
It's great that you felt called upon to report on the more detailed version.I wasn't so familiar with some things either.
There were also some new things for me.Thank you
Once again for your great, tireless commitment to Vivaldi. -
@johnny004
Hello,
Welcome to the 'Vivaldiverse'.Have fun and maybe also on 'Mastodon' social.vivaldi.net.
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@DonnyTinyHands
Google has a very difficult relationship with Vivaldi.
They harass Vivaldi and my impression after years here and on Mastodon social.vivaldi.net is that they want to flatten little Vivaldi, he's probably a thorn in their side.Vivaldi earns money through clicks on the pages of contractual partners.
Google pays large sums of money to its contractual partners, such as Microsoft, Apple, Firefox, Brave etc. for the use of its search engine.
Vivaldi does not receive a cent from Google.
But it still offers the Google search engine because users expect it.
My recommendation to users is to replace the Google search engine and 'Bing' with another search engine, which Vivaldi also offers.
Vivaldi is a real underdog on the browser market.
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The million dollar question:
Will Vivaldi become the default browser for him?
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@DonnyTinyHands What are your reasons for requiring it to be 100% open source? I'm just curious.
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@barbudo2005 said in Open Source:
The million dollar question:
Will Vivaldi become the default browser for him?
I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight xD
Aside from that, I wanted to say that I don't care at all that Vivaldi isn't 100% open source, even though I'm a big supporter of FOSS. I believe what matters much more is the spirit of the team behind it, certainly much more attentive to users compared to a multinational corporation.
Furthermore, I don't think I'm in any way favoring Google by using Vivaldi since they release the software open-source for purely commercial reasons, and I don't think they want people to be so attracted to other browsers based on their engine, unless they use Google services.
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I think open source offers some really obvious advantages.
One big one is not having to trust anyone. Not that I think there is anything at all unscrupulous about Vivaldi, just given the choice complete transparency is preferable to even the most trusted of sources.
I also think there are pretty obvious security benefits offered by having more people able to review the code.
We do so much in the browser now days that privacy and security are essential. Not something I'll compromise on for appealing looking QOL features or great performance.
I have options for my browser that are open source and work acceptably so that is now just the starting point that a browser absolutely needs to have for me to consider it.
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As @catweazle explained, for security and trust purposes Vivaldi is already open.
@Catweazle said in Open Source:
The only part of Vivaldi that is proprietary is 5% of the script corresponding to its only UI, which is also fully auditable and even modifiable by the user (here in the forum it is taught how to do it).
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@DonnyTinyHands, some nice news about OpenSource and trust
https://apiiro.com/blog/malicious-code-campaign-github-repo-confusion-attack/
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I 100% agree with this post. I love Vivaldi and would like to use it as primary browser on all my devices. However, being 100% open source is a condition for me. As to why, I guess it is a matter of principle. I do not like the idea of proprietary software in general, I would love to see world where all code is open and people just provide services and consulting around it
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@erbanales, the sense of OpenSource is that devs can fork it or collaborate in a new product. Because of this all current browser engines are opensource, Gecko it's fork Goanna, Blink and the Fork Qt, WebKit and the grandfather of Blink and WebKit, KHtml, still used by KDE in it's Konqueror browser.
Gecko is only used by Firefox and forks, which is a minority in the Browser market, same as WebKit, only used by Apple. Chromium is currently the most advanced engine and because of this used by the vast majority of current browsers, practically all that come out new.
As said, Chromium is OpenSource and used by almost 70 existing browsers, the bad, also by the worst companies of the market, Google and Microsoft. No big brother company use the Gecko engine, because of this, it's easy to make Firefox and forks OpenSource, but in Chromium browsers this is different, Chromium itself is OpenSource, but apart of the engine, all other layers which are somewhat special, like those of Vivaldi with it's unique features and UI, will be forked by Google and Microsoft, even Opera, in their browsers in the same moment when it becomes OpenSource, which will be the end of all other Chromiums and also for Vivaldi.
Because of this, none of the existing Chromiums with some speciall features are fully OpenSource, not only Vivaldi, because it's existence depend on it.
OpenSource Chromiums are simple forks as is, with some minor modifications in the code and another Logo. There isn't a problem to remain FOSS.
Anyway with almost 100 existing browsers out there, all based in 3 engines, the sense of OpenSource is very debatable, more for the user, for him prevail more the Company etics its transaparency and a good community, which is full given in Vivaldi, despite that 5% of it's script related to it's UI is protected, but full auditable and even moddeable by the user, the only thing, he can't use it for another browser.
OpenSource is fine, but don't confuse OpenSource as synonym of security and privacy or beeing trustworth, this depends only on the author or company and what he does with the fork he use.
