Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and founder of Vivaldi Technologies, refuses to integrate AI features in its browser and wants human engineers, not AI, to write its code.
If we ignore privacy and open-source considerations for a moment, Vivaldi has been one of my favorite browsers. They embraced vertical tabs, they offer customizability instead of forcing everyone into the same mold, and it doesn’t have all the anti-features (AI specifically) that some other browsers have.
I’m gonna give them a high five while continuing to use LibreWolf/IronFox.
I think AI should be a choice, not something every browser has to push on its users. Everyone has their own preferences.
Im never leaving zen, its been stable for a while now, was so ass when I started using it, now I never lose anything, forgot it used to be rough
Does the vimium plugin work on zen yet? That was the only pain point that was holding me back from switching last time I tried it.
I will always advocate ai for shit like this, just make it work yourself, debug it by using it. Make it show you it’s work, sometimes it’s a simple edit, have it avoid restructuring and use minimal code. Can easily be done for free. Ik it’s obviously preferred to have official support but for things like plugins, I just get to use them now instead of waiting for my issue to never be resolved.
Eh, until there is actual support I’ll just use a browser that supports what I need. Zen is nice, but the difference isn’t great enough for me to want to spend a whole bunch of time making things work.
For anyone saying it’s Chromium based as a reason to not use it: how is Mozilla any better at this point? Can you point to anything notable and positive that Mozilla has done in the past idk 10 years or so? They won’t even include adblocking with their browser our of fear they lose Google’s support.
Ad-blocker extensions aren’t crippled, browsers are fully open source including cloud services instead of Google’s open core model and Mozilla has a better track record on this sort of stuff. Also technically Firefox does have built-in ad blocking capabilities now but for some reason there isn’t a UI for it yet.
I’d consider not making adblocking built in part of the browser to be crippling the browser, who wants that? But if Mozilla did include it they’d lose millions in funding from guess who.
If you go to
about:configand enableprivacy.trackingprotection.content.protection.enabled, then you can add the blocklists toprivacy.trackingprotection.content.protection.test_list_urlsand use the built-in adblocker. I think Waterfox also builts a UI on top of this.Interesting feature but you lost 90% of users at “if you go to about:config”, Meanwhile since 2020 when you first launch vivalidi they just ask if you want to enable it
Who values their users more, the advertising company that has been shoveling in unwanted features to their browser for over a decade while leaving the most wanted one behind “about:config” or a 3rd party extension, or the one who’s browser actually has features people actually asked for?
Waterfox is great, hopefully they can continue without google’s support whenever google decided to pull the plug on firefox now that they no longer need it as anti-trust insurance.
Who values their users more, the advertising company that has been shoveling in unwanted features to their browser for over a decade while leaving the most wanted one behind “about:config” or a 3rd party extension, or the one who’s browser actually has features people actually asked for?
More like the company that values their users enough to make both the browser core and its cloud integrations open source versus a company that slapped a proprietary reskin that can’t be forked on top of Chromium.
Waterfox is great, hopefully they can continue without google’s support whenever google decided to pull the plug on firefox now that they no longer need it as anti-trust insurance.
I hope Vivaldi can survive when Google cripples Chromium like they’re doing with AOSP since its browser engine is literally made by them
Maintaining a viable cross platform 3rd party browser with proper extensions support including Ublock and strict tracking controls?
None of that is unique to Firefox though. Vivaldi has all those features too and adblock don’t even require an extension its just built in, Mozilla doesn’t even include adblocking by default.
An additional engine is important because otherwise the implementation becomes the standard instead of the engine following the standard. That is a risk to further competition. We saw that when IE won too hard over Netscape.
Tetzchner says the company asked its users whether they wanted added AI features, and the response was “no.”
Revolutionary technique, asking if anyone wants a feature before you go all-in on it.
- Microsoft enters the chat
“Customers don’t want it” is surprisingly difficult to understand for a lot of companies nowadays. Vivaldi must be run by some sort of language genius.
It’s a private compnay, they don’t have to follow shareholders so it explains it
Methinks shareholders should somehow be concerned what end users want.
Shareholders want the line to go up, currently AI is a thing that makes that happen, long-term effects be damned.
you don’t want to be the one that missed out by not jumping on the train.
based af. I’m installing Vivaldi right now, holy shit.
It’s Chromium based.
They’re right. Vivaldi is based
…on chromium
I’d use Vivaldi if it wasn’t chrorium and closed source, sadly it’s such a turn off
Isn’t Vivaldi largely open source?
the devs like to pretend that it is and say how only a small part of it is proprietary, but it’s a deceptive PR stunt because they’re counting the whole chromium source into that statistic. if we don’t consider the chromium source they didn’t write, their own vivaldi code is largely proprietary.
regardless, a program consisting of 99.9% free code and 0.1% proprietary code is proprietary as a whole - you can’t audit, modify or redistribute copies of it as long as any non-free code is present.
It’s hard to convince me to switch away from Firefox, but Vivaldi doesn’t seem like a horrible choice if you need Chromium for WebUSB or something.
If you really need Chromium … just use Chromium?
yeah, ungoogled chromium is boss
Vanadium appreciates the mention.
Is there a way to get a good adblock on Vanadium? I’ve still got it set as default on my phone but mostly use Firefox for regular stuff, but it’s so annoying to click a link in the Lemmy app and it opens in Vanadium with ads.
Not sure.
I use Vanadium as my clean-room browser, with no addons etc, when I want a page to just-work.
Oh, yeah that seems like a really good use for it.
