What is Direct Match?
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@DAOWAce To be clear: Vivaldi is not adding affiliate codes to links you click, and it is not intercepting visits to sites to change any existing affiliate links. Vivaldi had nothing to do with the honey scandal. Vivaldi is not doing anything in the background, and as you can see the above article was posted publicly explaining why the change was made so it was disclosed,
Direct match is effectively a form of default bookmarks, just like Firefox has. As the above article says, you can turn it off if you want.
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@DAOWAce It wasn’t silently, you are replying to a blog post informing users after all. It was also mentioned in the corresponding snapshot releases and in the stable release.
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@luetage And how did I find the blog post? By googling the affiliate code. Not everyone's going to be reading update notes and blog posts.. in fact I'm sure the majority of users don't.
https://vivaldi.com/changelog-vivaldi-browser-6-4/
This is the first mention of direct match in the release notes... and it explains nothing. I'm assuming you mean the blog post about the new release, not the changelog?
@LonM You don't need to be clear, I understand, and was making the reference to Honey out of frustration and disgust. However, it was not disclosed in-browser, which is the problem.
Clicking the "learn more" on the search options page (why is it in 2 places with different help texts?) sends you to https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/navigation/what-is-direct-match/, which does a good job hiding what the feature does, only stated in one sentence near the end: "In some cases, clicking a suggestion might involve a third-party affiliate network, which could set cookies for correctly attributing revenue to the right party, like how all affiliate links work across the web."
This blog post is much more honest.
Also, the "direct match" moniker belies the true nature of the function, and is an anti-function in many cases as it directs to URLs we've never visited in history, and (by default) ontop of the URLs we were trying to visit (another issue with the revamped address bar).
In more recent versions of the browser, it seems even more advertising was added too: https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/795273 (starting point of confirmation and discussion)
These concerns are valid, and seem to keep piling up.
