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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But they “abused” open source software themselves, so I’m going to call bullshit on that
Which the forks removed because unlike Vivaldi Firefox is open source