My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil

jon

A monopoly both in search and advertising, Google, unfortunately, shows that they are not able to resist the misuse of power.

Click here to see the full blog post

Cqoicebordel

They removed their "don't be evil" policy. Now, they are dictating what should be said and done.
It's censorship, at a global scale. Something urgent must be done.

mossman

Hate to say it but this is a big reason I was dubious about Vivaldi using Chromium as its basis.

The other reason is stagnation when everyone is using the same browser engine. Opera was what it was because it was different...

Banz

I lost faith in Google a long time ago... Good thing there are still persons like you sir Von Tetzchner are dedicated to do things right. I cannot thank you enough!

Cqoicebordel

@mossman: I totally agree with you.
But there is a big issue : building its own rendering engine would need at least 100 persons working for five years, just for that (no UI, nothing). For a company without any users, and so, without any revenues, it obviously isn't possible.
So, the plan here is that it's built upon Chromium for now, and the more users, the more revenues, the more hires, allowing more and more tweaks until a fork (possibly). It's the only reasonable path.

DriverOp

I stoped using Google products since about 2010 when I realized search results in its search engine became nothing more than a shopping list.

jon

@banz: Thank you for your kind words. It is not always easy to speak up, but I feel it is the right thing to do.

Cqoicebordel

In France, an association started "Dégooglelisont Internet" (https://degooglisons-internet.org/ you can switch the page to english) ("Lets ungoogle the Internet).
You can find on their page lots of open source replacements for Google's (or others closed) tools.
Don't hesitate to use them !

II_ARROWS

Then just refuse to bend to unacceptable condition, and leave your account suspended.
It's your power to diminish them, doing what you do only makes it worse and give them just more power.

paragon

Jon and Vivaldi community, I'm interested to understand more about Mozilla's relationship with Google, your thoughts on the matter and any further reading you or the Vivaldi community can refer me to.

You mention
"Google increased their proximity with the Mozilla foundation" are you implying this is a negative or undesirable outcome? Do you feel that Google have aligned themselves more with Mozilla than other companies working on browsers, such as Apple?

Do you think that Mozilla Firefox is able to render Google Docs and other Google web services more easily than Vivaldi?

Thank you for your time and the fantastic work of your team in developing Vivaldi. I use Bing and Ecosia as my preferred two search engines ^__~

Regards from chilly Melbourne, Australia!

jon

@paragon: Let me be clear. Vivaldi is able to use those services just fine, but we have to hide our identity to access some of them. We found that we were being blocked, but hiding our identity allowed access.

With regards to Mozilla, this is something that happened in the past. When Google was actively pushing Firefox, when they lived next door to each other and were close, that is when we started to see problems using Google services with Opera. I believe Mozilla and Google are no longer so close, but I am sure that Google services are not blocking Mozilla, given the market share of Mozilla and visibility.

jon

@ii_arrows: Clearly that was an option. We did, however, want to find out how long this would take and what it would take to regain access.

It is very special when a company has this kind of power. Luckily we are not depending on ads to grow, but rather on the quality of our products, but it is still important to make visible what is happening.

BeatKitano

is this the reason I regularly get captcha checked as a suspicious user on youtube ?
This is getting annoying tbh, if I make two search quickly I get a "are you a robot checkbox and then a captcha"...

jon

@beatkitano: I would not think that is related.

neltherion

Wait... What?
is that "Microsoft" I'm hearing all over again?

LonM

@beatkitano That tends to happen as part of google's anti-spambot measures. Lots of other services do that, and I notice that a lot when I use my VPN.

LonM

This is all quite worrying to hear. The most annoying part of all this, is the fact that there isn't any transparency here. Were you given a reason why your account was suspended?

jon

@lonm: At first there was not much at all, but gradually we were told what we needed to do to reopen. There was no message in the interface that we were blocked there was no warning and communication was minimal. We were being told that we need to know the rules, but when we asked what rules we had broken, we got vague answers, many of which we were told were not actual requirements, but seemingly required by us (none are followed by Google them selves on their browser site).

luca247

well at least we can say google is the reason why Vivaldi exist, to give the users a better web

rigo

@jon Have you considered that after the 2.4 billion € fine, the Commission considered Google as a monopolist and thus they are forced to contract and deliver ad words? This incident could cost them another 2.4 billion.
On the ad - side. I LOVE jolla, the unlike phone. They had a very successful campaign and are known widely now, without Google. Don't you underestimate the hunger people have to have an alternative? For almost 15 years, Opera was the leading alternative.
And there the story is not fully coherent, as vivaldi uses Google's rendering engine. And I know of no article explaining the protections in place against choices from Google Developers. I know you have them, but I'm looking for some written article that is easy to find.
And Vivaldi should take up the work presented by Håkon Bratsberg at the Workshop on user centric controls https://www.w3.org/2014/privacyws/agenda.html This was really promising. I think Vivaldi only makes sense if it is as unlike as the Jolla phone, but hopefully with a better business model KUTGW