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.
So just the way Firefox does it? Only local models, all configurable?
Perhaps
The recent controversy on House House makes me (only a little) worried that for the next century, most people will be hardline 100% never-AI, instead of just “Stop shoving it everywhere, stop copying artwork”. As people like Bernie have said, it’s an automation technology that can have nice effects should those use cases receive careful consideration. We just don’t often get that consideration.
I will never understand why the push to AI was so freaking AGGRESSIVE. Like, take it, shove it down your throat, avoidance of AI is BANNED, type of bullshit. It should speak for itself when it works.
AI seems to be mostly loved by old Gen X bosses who mostly don’t understand it and by Gen Z who sort of understand it.
I’m 38 and I’ve never ever found a use for AI except for trying to get chat GPT to recommend me new power metal bands, the only good bands it told me about were ones I already knew and the rest were crap.
Most of the bands I listen to today I got from Limewire back in 05.
AI is garbage.
“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.
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.
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
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
The UI being closed is a valid criticism for sure. I’ve read their reasoning for it and having seen how some corps abuse open source I find it a fair move, much more so then I consider not including an Adblock option out of the box, or whatever pocket was and shoveling in AI no one asked for. Certainly other people will have different priorities and I can respect that too.
I’ve read their reasoning for it and having seen how some corps abuse open source I find it a fair move
But they “abused” open source software themselves, so I’m going to call bullshit on that
much more so then I consider not including an Adblock option out of the box, or whatever pocket was and shoveling in AI no one asked for
Which the forks removed because unlike Vivaldi Firefox is open source
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.
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.
I’m not switching to Vivaldi, but it is refreshing to see someone say “I didn’t put X in the product because people don’t want X in the product.”
based af. I’m installing Vivaldi right now, holy shit.
It’s Chromium based.
I use AI on a daily basis and I don’t want AI in my browser. The desire to integrate AI into everything is not smart.
They’re right. Vivaldi is based
…on chromium
I’ve tried Vivaldi before in the past and it’s UI and cluttered interface turned me way off. I’ve got my own concerns about it still that hasn’t made me jump to it. That being, it relies on the Chrome Web Store to install extensions. If Google themselves decided not to have something on that store and you’re using it on Vivaldi, well you’re SOL.
That’s an advantage for Firefox, that has its own extensions. Some of us are stuck with Firefox despite their interestingly bad choices and historical lack of fulfilling promises on their own behalf. There are still key advantages with Firefox than most browsers.
And even if some of us are tired of Firefox anyway, we’ve got its forks to use.
I’m the inverse. The amount of customization and power user features are what makes it my daily driver, though I agree the reliance on Google isn’t good. Also having their sync data stored e2e encrypted with my own private key is a nice touch. Though if a heavily customizable fork of Firefox with features like that was available I’d likely switch. I don’t have the time to maintain a highly customized userchrome.css that could break with every update, unfortunately
It was when Vivaldi’s sync went down for idk, a month? that forced me onto Brave.
No reason to move back - maybe until now
Vivaldis not bad. Good for work where you need different profiles; not crazy resource intensive
I’m on librewolf just now having used vivaldi for about three years as my daily. Great browser, I just fancied swapping the chromium problems for gecko problems for a while :D
And for people like me with a problem closing tabs, the memory management is excellent, killing off anything that hasn’t been used in a while.
You can do that in Firefox too tbf
So what you’re saying is there are two good alternatives out there now?!
No, there is only Firefox.
Firefox gang ✊🏼
