Vivaldi browser and open-source
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Thanks for clarification…
But… may I have a few questions?
- Is it intentional that the latest pack of the back-end code is for 2.10?
- I haven’t had a look at it yet, but it’s from a big part coz it’s big (well this can’t be solved) and gets outdated with every release. Why not publish it (still talking about the back-end code) as a git (or whatever VCS) repo?
- If Vivaldi really dies… (pls pls don’t ever die) …are there any reasons why, as the very last thing, couldn’t it (Vivaldi in its completeness) be made open source (the way open source is usually understood)?
I know, I know, I won’t ever be able to make anything off it, but it would make things more… complete.
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I am fine with closed source if it does what it should and if I can configure it as I want.
.. and Mods?
Well you could expose and document some of the internal Vivaldi APIs to let users adapt Vivaldi to their needs. I am thinking of the Sessions API and the extended Tabs API ... -
@QuHno Very true. Open interfaces are arguably more important than open source code.
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I agree or disagree on some points, but some things can be enhanced :
- Definitely put in your licence an "Open Source if dead" sentence. Don't leave the users in doubt until it's too late.
- As @QuHno said, expose the internal APIs to extensions and modders.
- You can't ask modders to mods when you obfuscate the JS code. That's not fair.
- Host a mods and theme catalogue, allowing easy usage of those.
All in all, I'm fully for Open Sourcing Vivaldi, even without accepting contributions. But the "not going back" argument is the best, from my POV.
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@QuHno said in Vivaldi browser and open-source:
.. and Mods?
Well you could expose and document some of the internal Vivaldi APIs to let users adapt Vivaldi to their needs. I am thinking of the Sessions API and the extended Tabs API ...I’m thinking of the UI… more concretely, it would be nice if it had any API even if we’d have to document it ourselves.
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I grew up with Windows, and I have no problem at all with closed source. I still would love to see you go to closed source presto, if it is possible at all. Because it is still much better in many ways than any other browser. If it's about attracting users, you have many more users to attract with your uniqueness, rather than going with open souece.
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14th
I remember Presto and how great its RAM usage was compared to Chromium, 175 tab and 25 Windows RAM usage still under 800MB. I also remember Opera Unite. I have a few old Opera wallpapers from Opera 9.5 era.
Even operating systems have a mix of open-source and closed-source code code. Apple has a list of open-source here https://opensource.apple.com. Parts of some apps Microsoft has are open-source now https://opensource.microsoft.com.
Each company has to find its balance of open and closed source code. -
@potmeklecbohdan: I don't work on the actual source code publishing, but apparently, there has been some issue with source code publishing for a while. We'll get it fixed soon. When it comes to putting it under version control, I don't think i would make a big difference as we currently only want to publish source changes present in publicly released versions anyway.
Making Vivaldi fully open-source if we perceive that we're going to be in trouble is a possibility, depending on circumstances. We'll have to decide how to handle it when the time comes (Hopefully, in a very long time).
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@quhno: Technically, you can figure out our internal API by reading the published code. The .json files under /extensions/schema describe the full API. If you can make sense of C++, then the implementation is under /extensions/api. In general, the json files are supposed to use descriptions to explain what everything is doing. If there is something there that you can't understand, then it's probably something we should fix.
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TLDR: Money. Not that there is anything wrong with it.
But I find the argument about protecting the brand and being afraid of forks bit ironic since you rely on chromium. Without it, there is arguably no Vivaldi. This is de facto a fork of chrome. So you benefit from open source tremendously.
What this article is missing is how is Vivaldi giving back to opensource. I genuinely don't know. If there are lot of upstream contributions to chromium or other libraries, it would make this whole argument a lot more sound.
Not to mention you ¯_(ツ)_/¯ged security with, let us know. I know you might mean well.
With all respect, I think this blogpost missed the mark.Something closer to reality is:
We happily take chromium from Google. They are rich assholes and chrome sucks. We made it better, but we also need to eat. There are ads, but we made them easy to remove. We made it impossible to fork Vivaldi further. We think it is fair. We still keep most of the stuff open source, because you know, we have to (pesky licences).Lastly, I still love Vivaldi and respect the business model. I just don't love this blogpost.
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@julien_picalausa Thank you for the reply.
When it comes to putting it under version control, I don't think i would make a big difference as we currently only want to publish source changes present in publicly released versions anyway.
OK, seems like I should first have a look at it.
(Hopefully, in a very long time).
Hopefully never.
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@LeBaux said in Vivaldi browser and open-source:
There are ads, but we made them easy to remove.
What ads? I've never seen any ads in my Vivaldi installs, nor have I ever had to "remove" them.
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@potmeklecbohdan: Well, heat death and the universe and all that. Pretty hard to overcome that one
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@julien_picalausa said in Vivaldi browser and open-source:
heat death
Assuming that's how it actually ends... rather than a big rip, or crunch, or some other currently unknowable future.
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@pathduck: I'm hoping that if we somehow manage to all become billionaires, we'll all realize that we have enough money that we can just open source the whole thing and maintain it for fun
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@BoneTone said in Vivaldi browser and open-source:
What ads? I've never seen any ads in my Vivaldi installs, nor have I ever had to "remove" them.
There are the initial bookmarks which come with every Vivaldi install. And the default search engines (bar Google) could be seen as adds since they are also from sponsors.
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@BoneTone , not banners with advertisings, Vivaldi use default search engines from sponsors and default bookmarks from others. All this you can delete, if you don't use them.
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@Chas4 said in Vivaldi browser and open-source:
Presto ... RAM usage was compared to Chromium, 175 tab and 25 Windows RAM usage still under 800MB.
To be fair, if you used the current Vivaldi browser to browse the pre-July 2013 web, you might get similar numbers. Content is richer now, and the rich parts are larger. While the design paradigm of Chromium does use more memory per tab than some other designs, the really large memory consumption comes from the content.
I also remember Opera Unite. I have a few old Opera wallpapers from Opera 9.5 era.
Content was even lighter in 2008.
Even operating systems have a mix of open-source and closed-source code code. Apple has a list of open-source here https://opensource.apple.com. Parts of some apps Microsoft has are open-source now https://opensource.microsoft.com.
Each company has to find its balance of open and closed source code.It's great to see this put into the larger context to gain some perspective. How many mixed source software shops host a forum where they let users post mods effecting their closed source assets? I'll assume there are others, the world is a very large place even limiting ourselves to this planet, but Vivaldi is the only one that comes to mind right now. Users still exhibit a great degree of control over even the 5% of the browser that is closed source, either through the customizations Vivaldi has built into the product, or through community-based code that we can insert into the application ourselves.
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@Komposten said in Vivaldi browser and open-source:
There are the initial bookmarks which come with every Vivaldi install. And the default search engines (bar Google) could be seen as adds since they are also from sponsors.
@Catweazle said in Vivaldi browser and open-source:
@BoneTone , not banners with advertisings, Vivaldi use default search engines from sponsors and default bookmarks from others. All this you can delete, if you don't use them.
If default bookmarks & search engines qualify as ads, I don't know of a single browser that doesn't have ads upon initial install. Which kind of renders the point moot, it's nothing different and irrelevant to the topic. When people talk about ads in browsers, they're talking about things that are displayed alongside or on top of the content being accessed, for which Vivaldi has a built-in blocker.
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@BoneTone gif are not much bigger today and a website that is 96% text should not need 2GB of RAM, Google has ignored the RAM usage for a long time others using Chromium have not. The RAM usage is also an issue for lower end devices, as 1 tab should not make a device completely unusable for anything else, I also remember Chrome from back around 2008 having the same issues. Also content was not lighter in some cases it was much heavier (Flash Player & Java plug in performance on macOS).
Open-source and closed source projects can push each other to get better with performance and features.