I daily drive Firefox, but more and more websites are starting to break without Chromium, so I still have to occasionally switch to get something working. I was using Ungoogled Chromium until I realized that there was no easy way to update it when that pixel-stealing exploit came out a while back.
To be clear, I’m not talking about stock “no settings changed” Vivaldi. With that requirement, even Firefox could be called invasive! What I want to know is if Vivaldi is relatively safe to use with all the telemetry and stuff disabled in the settings and using any necessary extensions.
Thanks!
I would be much more happy to give Vivaldi a go if we lived in a world where much more browser diversity existed.
You’d need a very good reason to not use Firefox given that it’s all that stands against a Google monopoly on web standards. I was using a Chromium-based browser myself until Opera and Microsoft both abandoned their own browser engines - after that I couldn’t possibly justify not supporting Firefox.
Vivaldi does look very good, and takes me back to the old Opera days when Opera was good. But from a privacy point of view it’s just short-sighted to use a chromium-based browser, even if that browser promises and provides privacy.
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OK, fair enough, I misread your question. Honestly I’ve not really encountered many websites that don’t work on Firefox, less than 1% surely, and when I do I tend to avoid that website. If I can’t avoid it I tend to fall back to using GNOME Web (Epiphany), or ungoogled Chromium from Flathub (which I think receives regular updates, I’m not sure what the exploit you’re talking about is, should I be worried?).
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Well, Vivaldi is Chromium, but stripped out all google tracking APIs, except some which are in the privacy settings to the user choice. Even the API of the Chrome store, if you demark it, Vivaldi isn’t even recognized as Chromium.
Are you replying to the right person?
I think so, because your doubts about using a Chromium and diversity. Vivaldi in first line isn’t a Chromium like others, it uses Blink as renderer and with this ends the similarity with others. Blink is currently the best engine of the 3 that already exist, discounting some exotic ones, which only have a testimonial presence among the more than 100 browsers that exist on the market and another 70 that have already given up and were abandoned.
Google’s influence on Chromium is based solely on the APIs it includes, which other manufacturers, such as Vivaldi, remove, Google’s influence is mainly on the Internet itself, on web pages that include GoogleAPIs and on the countless services and apps that Google offers. Vivaldi, by the way, was the first who, together with others and the Norwegian Consumer consortium, was active against the hegemony and abuses of Google, long before Mozilla, which continues to be subsidized by Google and even with Google devs working on Firefox.
Privacy, at this point Firefox, regarding Fingerprint protection, is somewhat better than Vivaldi, but this in Vivaldi can be achieved using an extension, such as JShelter, NoScript or similar, however it has a built-in ad- and trackerblocker that can be customized , for this Firefox needs an extension. That is, both are as private as the user wants and they are certainly currently the Browsers that best respect privacy.
Brave is not that private, apart from its shady dealings with crypto companies that like to redirect users, as well as the fact that its trackingblocker likes to ignore its sponsors, among others Facebook.
Opera (current) is even worse, it directly sells user data, not even the VPN it offers is really one, it is a simple proxy on Opera’s own servers, which also logs user activities. There’s not much left to choose from, apart from some FF or Chromium forks. It is what it is, the rest is the personal taste and needs of each user, to decide which browser is the best. The real enemy is for all user the same, those companys which convert a free internet in its private property, not the browser of other users.