A proprietary browser is a non-starter for me, especially when there are many free alternatives, even Chromium based ones. I’d take Ungoogled-Chromium on desktop or Cromite on mobile, heck I’d take Brave even.
Yes, Vivaldi isn’t fullFOSS, because 5% of the script of the unique UI is proprietary of Vivaldi, but it’s 100% auditable and even moddeable by the user, they even show how to do it in its community. Edge and Chrome would fork it in the same moment when Vivaldi make it OpenSource, killing all other Chromium and Vivaldi itself. Maybe in the future it will go full OpenSource, there are still intern debates about it.
The sense of OpenSource is to be capable to collaborate in new products, but with almost 100 browsers and forks in the market, this value is pretty debatable. For the user is more important the ethics of the company respect the user, in this case a european, employee-owned cooperative, which is given with a full transparency in all it’s services included in the account (mail, calendar, feed, blog, the Vivaldi Mastodon instance, e2ee sync in own server, etc.).
I will continue to maintain that it is bitterly ironic for a product which is 95% based on free software to be so hostile to software freedom. They feel so entitled to take but don’t want to give back, and they justify it by saying that that others will do the same thing they did if they do make it fully free.
A proprietary browser is a non-starter for me, especially when there are many free alternatives, even Chromium based ones. I’d take Ungoogled-Chromium on desktop or Cromite on mobile, heck I’d take Brave even.
Yes, Vivaldi isn’t fullFOSS, because 5% of the script of the unique UI is proprietary of Vivaldi, but it’s 100% auditable and even moddeable by the user, they even show how to do it in its community. Edge and Chrome would fork it in the same moment when Vivaldi make it OpenSource, killing all other Chromium and Vivaldi itself. Maybe in the future it will go full OpenSource, there are still intern debates about it. The sense of OpenSource is to be capable to collaborate in new products, but with almost 100 browsers and forks in the market, this value is pretty debatable. For the user is more important the ethics of the company respect the user, in this case a european, employee-owned cooperative, which is given with a full transparency in all it’s services included in the account (mail, calendar, feed, blog, the Vivaldi Mastodon instance, e2ee sync in own server, etc.).
I will continue to maintain that it is bitterly ironic for a product which is 95% based on free software to be so hostile to software freedom. They feel so entitled to take but don’t want to give back, and they justify it by saying that that others will do the same thing they did if they do make it fully free.