I’ve been a Chrome user for a long time until last year when I took up Vivaldi.
They claim to be more privacy centered (obviously not as fully private as TOR) and it runs on the Chromium engine (which I still find better than Firefox. The extensions on the Chrome Web Store are just more diverse)
I think that Vivaldi is a viable [privacy-wise] Chromium alternative and I love it.
What are your thoughts on this?
if you want good chrome browser. use ungoogled chromium and/or brave
couple more notes:
It’s biggest con is that it’s not open source, though you can view the backend source code.
Other than that, it’s a really nice browser and the company and ownership are far more ethical than Brave.
I’m still on Firefox for now though.
Simply use a product that fits your use cases.
Be aware that Vivaldi collects statistics about your usage:
For a while we’ve been relying on a unique user counting request stored on your computer. It tells us simply “This is the same user we’ve counted before”.
Right now, we’re working on a new implementation. It requires a fair bit of coding but we’ll get there.
We also know what version of Vivaldi you’re running, the type of processor chip, OS, and screen resolution. Not much to be honest.
Source: https://vivaldi.com/zerotracking/
When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message. We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup. The purpose of this collection is to determine the total number of active users and their geographical distribution.
Source: https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/
In general, Chromium-based web browsers support new web standards more quickly than Firefox or Safari. One reason for this is that many new web standards come from Google nowadays.
Hey I 'm glad you’re moving away from chrome!
To me even to some others here the step might seem small going from chrome to vivaldi is already a step forward.
And I definitely get why you prefer it so much. There are so many useful features integrated into the browser like tab stacking the side-panel moving tabs left right wherever etc.
It definitely feels like a more ‘complete’ package in a sense then some other browsers.
Do keep in mind though, Vivaldi’s blog is more a show then reality, at least it seems vivaldi itself doesn’t really know where they want to stand and being in the middle is awkward.
Especially since most of their posts they make themselves out to be privacy evangelists.
And this is just plain BS.
Also abou tor.
Tor is a whole other ballgame. There are some whom use the tor browser as a daily driver yes: however for most people and from what I could make up with what I could read from your post.
You likely won’t be there yet, (not that you have to get there). and would prefer a browser which allows you to login to websites and keep most of your data stored, to be conveniently accessible.
Tor is not that.
The Tor browser uses the onion protocol. [link vid].
Every user of tor has the same fingerprint if used correctly (don’t install extensions or change settings apart from those you see in the option menu’s.)
So this way every person whom uses the tor network through the tor browser, - which is a modified version of firefox. Has almost identical fingerprints, - say to the servers visited by a tor browser all tor browsers have the same style of dressing and haircut.
Along with that tor browser is a very valuable tool whenever you feel like looking up something online you don’t want your ISP government, insurance company or whomever else to find out about searching such and such.
I would say: download it here: https://www.torproject.org/download/
And try it out.
As for a more private browser Vivaldi is perhaps better then chrome but still largely build on the same codebase, also as far as I am aware they haven’t put any effort into removing google spyware from their version of chrome/ium.
I’m using Vivaldi as a second browser. I’ve been using Opera for years, but they are worse than Chrome when it comes to privacy. Vivaldi is good enough. And also feature rich. Way better than Chrome, Edge, Brave… Even better than Opera in some ways
I like that they provide some interesting features to the mix, something that has been entirely lost in others browsers (Firefox, Opera) a long time ago. The main concern to me is privacy-wise, since it’s not open-source and I can get by just fine with Firefox for now.
But I use it regularly as well and am quite happy with it. A lot of people complain about bugs and performance for some reason, but it works great for me.
Great review by LearnLinuxTV highlighting some cool features (I didn’t know about tiled tabs but I’m definitely going to use it heavily from now on):