Chromium based is precisely the problem there. Chromium is a Google project and they exercise tight control over it. Ads are the primary source of revenue for Google and it continues to push features and behaviors in the engine that are conducive towards ads and tracking.
If Chromium ends up being the only browser engine implementation on the market than it becomes the de facto standard. There won’t even be any real open standards anymore, it’s just going to be whatever Chromium is doing. This is how things worked back in the days of IE.
Firefox helps protect web standards by the mere fact of existing. Having at least two independent implementations of these standards ensures they’re followed and aren’t just whatever Google decided to do in Chromium.
If Google decided to take Chromium in a direction that’s actively harmful to the public then browsers like Vivaldi will be in serious trouble. The resources necessary to fork and maintain the engine independently are quite significant, and a small coop in Norway is not likely to muster them.
They know it and in every update of Chromium they need a week or so to eliminate some parts of the Chromium source, launching first a snapshot version, also if they include some new features and improvements, which are used by some some users and after this a stable versión of Vivaldi. Because of this the update of Vivaldi is something behind the Chromium updates.
The problem is valid for all browsers, all of the engines are influenced by Google, because Google also determine the Webstandarts and all engines (Blink, Gecko or WebKit) have to respect it or lose compatibility.
Google don’t need to modify Chromium. Because of this, currently is irrelevant the engine you use, all of them are FOSS. The webstandarts are best for the most used engine and this is Chromium with a great distance from any other.
As I said before, getting a free internet does not mean using one or another browser or engine, but fighting the underlying problem, tracking and surveillance, using products that do not, regardless of whether they are OpenSource or not.
Focusing on a browser that is only in 4% of the market, nothing will change if it use the same rejectable practices.
A way is to use EU browsers, because they adjust the EU norm of Privacy, which in US products don’t exist. Another Chromium I use, is the French UR browser which don’t track the user and it’s closed source. Vivaldi use 5% of the source of the UI protected but auditable, it mean, the user can modify it for its use, but can’t fork it to make another browser (avoid Google to imitate Vivaldi in Chrome, Jon won’t make the same mistake he made in old Opera, now prprietary of a Chinese Company and with the worst privacy, full of trackers (9 in the Android version and nearly a dozen in desktop)).
Let’s start with the fact that Vivaldi itself isn’t even even open source. It’s a freeware product based on Chromium that’s developed by Google. This seems far more problematic than Mozilla to me.
The problem is not valid for all browsers precisely because different implementation expose the inner workings and force them to be clearly documented. These things become explicit as opposed to being implicit. Mozilla and W3C also still have some power to prevent Google from simply ramming through whatever they want. That would no longer be the case if Chromium was the only game in town.
And you’re never going to convince me that using closed source products that promote technologies developed by surveillance companies is the way towards free and open internet.
First, Vivaldi isn’t OpenSource in the sense of a completly free and open public source, but 95% of the source is FOSS and the rest of 5%, regarding the UI, is open for audit and accesible for the user , who can modify it to its like. But it avoid that Chrome or other Chromium can imitate Vivaldi, because this are the dead of a still very small company.
There is a brutal browser war in a very saturated market, with about 100 different browsers, most of them Chromium and another 70 that have been left behind discontinued, precisely because they are FOSS, because they were imitated by larger companies with more users.
There is no other possibility for a small business to protect itself against large competitors.
Vivaldi some time ago even dispensed with its own UA in favor of users, who have been excluded and even blocked by pages in the hands of large companies, not for lack of compatibility or security, but for browsersniffing with commercial interests. This forced to disguise Vivaldi as Chrome, with which these problems disappeared.
FOSS is a good system for sharing and develope new projects, but in a saturated marked it dosn’t make much sense, browser are not a new product and Google and MS only turn’s stronger with new FOSS browsers, forking their source for Chrome and Edge, with which a browser of a small company is death. (see Wiki, list of discontinued browsers)
Yes, Firefox is still a important alternative, but also is loosing users, because it’s going more and mor a way marked by Google and not by the user.
Brave “the privacy focused” browser, make money blocking only tracker and ad from sites which ar not the sponsored, but not so the sponsor ads and trackers, among them Facebook.
Opera is direct Spyware, because Privacy in China isn’t something known.
Fundamentally, the problem is that any software developed for commercial purposes will always be developed to make profit first and foremost. That’s the core imperative of a business. The needs of the users will always be secondary to the need of making profit. Plenty of companies start out with good intentions, and it always ends the same. FOSS is the only way to ensure that software puts the needs of the users first because profit is not the driving force behind it.
Yes, but also FOSS browser need to make money, for the infrastructure, developement and servers, which cost money.
It isn’t the cuestion of FOSS or not, it’s the cuestion of the etics of the developer and how he makes money.
Mozilla makes money with user surveillance and selling this data to Alphabet, Nest and Google
Vivaldi makes money with including search engines and links of sponsors by default, which the user can delete if he want, apart from a shop with some merchandizing. Apart is an activist** against** the user surveillance (the only of the browser companies in the list of this initative).
See the diference? Not all what is proprietary is also automaticly crap and not al FOSS protect privacy and is secure by default. This depends only of the etics of the devs.
Example: DupeGuru, FOSS app for Mac, Windows and Linux, but take a look what VirusTotal says. Like this there are others too, apart from those flagged as Bundleware.
Again, Firefox does not do any user surveillance, and Mozilla isn’t inherently dependent on Google the way companies making browsers based on Chromium are. And since making profit is the goal for these companies, there is no mechanism to guarantee they will continue to behave ethically going forward. None of what is proprietary can be trusted in the long term, and it’s a fundamental mistake to rely on proprietary tools.
Not so easy. There is never a guarantee of ethical behavior, regardless of whether we are talking about FOSS or a company. Naturally it cannot be excluded that Vivaldi may one day move into unethical practices, but this, in view of the history of Jon von Tetzchner and his cooperative that is Vivaldi, is highly unlikely. Adding the activism right against these practices in which he is involved.
There are quite a few small software companies that have been in the market for a long time, with proprietary products, more ethical than some others with FOSS products.
A good example a two brothers, which with own money in their spare time (they are working as electricians in their own workshop), have created a page with online tools (office tools, graphics and a lot of others) free to use (they accept donations), without account needed, anonimous (the documents a saved locally in html format) PWA. It’s freeware, the office suite is also downloadable.
With the shortest and best TOS and PP I have ever seen. Apart of this, a fast and friendly user support.
Firefox certainly isn’t the worse and I use it as second browser for occasional use, apart from the French browser UR. But I trust more in browsers from european compañies than of those from US companies, because the privacy laws in the CE are a lot better than those form US, where they even don’t exists or only poorly.
Ethic depends only of the Dev or company of a product, not of the license it has. The ethic of a product youu can se in the conditions of the use and how they treat your data. (read those from Firefox, maybe you’ll have a surprise)
You can’t guarantee ethical behavior, but not having a conflict of interest is a prerequisite for it. Commercial software has an inherent conflict of interest that doesn’t exist in FOSS environment. Companies either have to make profit or they perish, this is not the case for FOSS. Ethics depend on being able to ensure that the incentives of the developers align with the incentives of the users. This is not possible to do with close source software in the long run.
Chromium based is precisely the problem there. Chromium is a Google project and they exercise tight control over it. Ads are the primary source of revenue for Google and it continues to push features and behaviors in the engine that are conducive towards ads and tracking.
If Chromium ends up being the only browser engine implementation on the market than it becomes the de facto standard. There won’t even be any real open standards anymore, it’s just going to be whatever Chromium is doing. This is how things worked back in the days of IE.
Firefox helps protect web standards by the mere fact of existing. Having at least two independent implementations of these standards ensures they’re followed and aren’t just whatever Google decided to do in Chromium.
If Google decided to take Chromium in a direction that’s actively harmful to the public then browsers like Vivaldi will be in serious trouble. The resources necessary to fork and maintain the engine independently are quite significant, and a small coop in Norway is not likely to muster them.
They know it and in every update of Chromium they need a week or so to eliminate some parts of the Chromium source, launching first a snapshot version, also if they include some new features and improvements, which are used by some some users and after this a stable versión of Vivaldi. Because of this the update of Vivaldi is something behind the Chromium updates.
The problem is valid for all browsers, all of the engines are influenced by Google, because Google also determine the Webstandarts and all engines (Blink, Gecko or WebKit) have to respect it or lose compatibility.
Google don’t need to modify Chromium. Because of this, currently is irrelevant the engine you use, all of them are FOSS. The webstandarts are best for the most used engine and this is Chromium with a great distance from any other.
As I said before, getting a free internet does not mean using one or another browser or engine, but fighting the underlying problem, tracking and surveillance, using products that do not, regardless of whether they are OpenSource or not. Focusing on a browser that is only in 4% of the market, nothing will change if it use the same rejectable practices.
A way is to use EU browsers, because they adjust the EU norm of Privacy, which in US products don’t exist. Another Chromium I use, is the French UR browser which don’t track the user and it’s closed source. Vivaldi use 5% of the source of the UI protected but auditable, it mean, the user can modify it for its use, but can’t fork it to make another browser (avoid Google to imitate Vivaldi in Chrome, Jon won’t make the same mistake he made in old Opera, now prprietary of a Chinese Company and with the worst privacy, full of trackers (9 in the Android version and nearly a dozen in desktop)).
Let’s start with the fact that Vivaldi itself isn’t even even open source. It’s a freeware product based on Chromium that’s developed by Google. This seems far more problematic than Mozilla to me.
The problem is not valid for all browsers precisely because different implementation expose the inner workings and force them to be clearly documented. These things become explicit as opposed to being implicit. Mozilla and W3C also still have some power to prevent Google from simply ramming through whatever they want. That would no longer be the case if Chromium was the only game in town.
And you’re never going to convince me that using closed source products that promote technologies developed by surveillance companies is the way towards free and open internet.
First, Vivaldi isn’t OpenSource in the sense of a completly free and open public source, but 95% of the source is FOSS and the rest of 5%, regarding the UI, is open for audit and accesible for the user , who can modify it to its like. But it avoid that Chrome or other Chromium can imitate Vivaldi, because this are the dead of a still very small company.
There is a brutal browser war in a very saturated market, with about 100 different browsers, most of them Chromium and another 70 that have been left behind discontinued, precisely because they are FOSS, because they were imitated by larger companies with more users. There is no other possibility for a small business to protect itself against large competitors.
Vivaldi some time ago even dispensed with its own UA in favor of users, who have been excluded and even blocked by pages in the hands of large companies, not for lack of compatibility or security, but for browsersniffing with commercial interests. This forced to disguise Vivaldi as Chrome, with which these problems disappeared.
FOSS is a good system for sharing and develope new projects, but in a saturated marked it dosn’t make much sense, browser are not a new product and Google and MS only turn’s stronger with new FOSS browsers, forking their source for Chrome and Edge, with which a browser of a small company is death. (see Wiki, list of discontinued browsers)
Yes, Firefox is still a important alternative, but also is loosing users, because it’s going more and mor a way marked by Google and not by the user.
Brave “the privacy focused” browser, make money blocking only tracker and ad from sites which ar not the sponsored, but not so the sponsor ads and trackers, among them Facebook.
Opera is direct Spyware, because Privacy in China isn’t something known.
Fundamentally, the problem is that any software developed for commercial purposes will always be developed to make profit first and foremost. That’s the core imperative of a business. The needs of the users will always be secondary to the need of making profit. Plenty of companies start out with good intentions, and it always ends the same. FOSS is the only way to ensure that software puts the needs of the users first because profit is not the driving force behind it.
Yes, but also FOSS browser need to make money, for the infrastructure, developement and servers, which cost money. It isn’t the cuestion of FOSS or not, it’s the cuestion of the etics of the developer and how he makes money. Mozilla makes money with user surveillance and selling this data to Alphabet, Nest and Google Vivaldi makes money with including search engines and links of sponsors by default, which the user can delete if he want, apart from a shop with some merchandizing. Apart is an activist** against** the user surveillance (the only of the browser companies in the list of this initative). See the diference? Not all what is proprietary is also automaticly crap and not al FOSS protect privacy and is secure by default. This depends only of the etics of the devs.
Example: DupeGuru, FOSS app for Mac, Windows and Linux, but take a look what VirusTotal says. Like this there are others too, apart from those flagged as Bundleware.
Again, Firefox does not do any user surveillance, and Mozilla isn’t inherently dependent on Google the way companies making browsers based on Chromium are. And since making profit is the goal for these companies, there is no mechanism to guarantee they will continue to behave ethically going forward. None of what is proprietary can be trusted in the long term, and it’s a fundamental mistake to rely on proprietary tools.
Not so easy. There is never a guarantee of ethical behavior, regardless of whether we are talking about FOSS or a company. Naturally it cannot be excluded that Vivaldi may one day move into unethical practices, but this, in view of the history of Jon von Tetzchner and his cooperative that is Vivaldi, is highly unlikely. Adding the activism right against these practices in which he is involved. There are quite a few small software companies that have been in the market for a long time, with proprietary products, more ethical than some others with FOSS products. A good example a two brothers, which with own money in their spare time (they are working as electricians in their own workshop), have created a page with online tools (office tools, graphics and a lot of others) free to use (they accept donations), without account needed, anonimous (the documents a saved locally in html format) PWA. It’s freeware, the office suite is also downloadable. With the shortest and best TOS and PP I have ever seen. Apart of this, a fast and friendly user support. Firefox certainly isn’t the worse and I use it as second browser for occasional use, apart from the French browser UR. But I trust more in browsers from european compañies than of those from US companies, because the privacy laws in the CE are a lot better than those form US, where they even don’t exists or only poorly. Ethic depends only of the Dev or company of a product, not of the license it has. The ethic of a product youu can se in the conditions of the use and how they treat your data. (read those from Firefox, maybe you’ll have a surprise)
You can’t guarantee ethical behavior, but not having a conflict of interest is a prerequisite for it. Commercial software has an inherent conflict of interest that doesn’t exist in FOSS environment. Companies either have to make profit or they perish, this is not the case for FOSS. Ethics depend on being able to ensure that the incentives of the developers align with the incentives of the users. This is not possible to do with close source software in the long run.