It is clear that Google in many Chromium updates, also adds some dirty trick to be able to track the user, but so far the Vivaldi Team has also eliminated it again, before releasing the update for users. They are very good at this.
About web formats, I am not talking about the fact that browsers can render a page or not, this is done by Gecko, Blink and WebKit more or less equally well, I am talking about different page formats that require one or another Google API, for example Crypto Tokens (It is a Google API that in Vivaldi can be deactivated in the configuration), without these it is not possible, for example, to log in on many pages, because they do not accept you as a safe browser.
Google does not need to lend a lot of hand to Chromium, if it is Google that today determines the web standards, no other.
The vast majority of websites are oriented to these standards and use plug-ins from Google and others, whether you like it or not.
Again, this approach works for surface level changes in Chromium. Should Google make deeper structural changes, then the amount of work to maintain a fork would drastically increase. And what APIs are you suggesting can be turned off in Vivaldi that can’t be turned off in Firefox?
And you misunderstood my point regarding Chromium. I’m talking about things like ad blocker support that rely on Chromium design. Google is actively looking for ways to neuter such plugins right now. While, Chromium based browsers could be affected by this, Firefox is not dependent on internal workings of Chromium.
Vivaldi has its own ad and trackerblocker, with a list of expandable filters. It even uses filters that block these annoying Cookie pop-ups and Malware.
As Chromium, of course, you can use extensions from the Chrome Store, but you can also install it from third-party sources, for example from GitHub or Sourceforge, among others, although most of the extensions are redundant, because Vivaldi includes them as its own functions.
Do not confuse Vivaldi with other Chromium forks, which mainly limit themselves to just putting their own logo on a Chromium as is, nothing to do with it.
I just invite you to preview it and see for yourself that Vivaldi has nothing to do, not only with any other Chromium, or with any other browser on the market. More than a browser, it can almost be called an online productivity suite.
It’s a democratic collaboration between users and the Vivaldi team, in a community as there are few (already more than 2 million users active internationally in this community.)
There is no guarantee that what Vivaldi implemented will continue being compatible with hwo Chromium works internally. These are surface level changes. You’re marketing Vivaldi, which is a commercial closed source product based on Google tech. I’m really not interested in it. I think we’ve said all there is to say about it at this point.
Vivaldi’s ‘Closed Source’ is only for commercial use precisely and is only a small part of the UI. It is accessible to users and modifiable by them, in the forum they even teach how to do it. Of course, the user can do this at his own risk.
This only prevents the big Chromiums, Chrome, Edge and Opera from using it for their own purposes, although if in the latest versions of these it is seen that they try to copy it, adding bad copies of these functionalities. Closed Source in the sense that you can’t fork Vivaldi and publish it with another Brand (for the moment, there are internal discussions on this matter and perhaps in the future, when Vivaldi has achieved a certain strong percentage in the market, it can allow itself to go completely FOSS, for the moment it would be suicide)
As I said before, although Google can add certain things to Chromium, it cannot influence its development, since this would also mean having to revoke the status of FOSS to Chromium, which is nothing short of impossible and it will also have to face Microsoft and to Edge, which is not in Google’s interest at all.
What Google does is this, to add APIs, which Vivaldi removes, or to eliminate the ability to sync with Google’s servers, which has certainly broken the neck of a whole series of other Chromiums. But it turns out that Vivaldi has never used sync with Google servers, but always with its own servers with end to end encryption, Vivaldi itself has neither access to this data nor to the sync passwords. That is, if you lose your sync password, you cannot recover it, it is the price of privacy.
Where Google prefers to influence is in web standards, this is what it is mainly dedicated to, since, being the dominant company on the web, it knows that most of the pages are oriented to Google’s standards in its creation, that is why Blink currently has the best performance and compatibility with newer formats.
Meanwhile going with Firefox, also depends on Google (Yes) or using some firefox forks, which are most outdated, not very stable, also depending de Mozilla and with this de Google ore otherwise with Systeme One, even worse .
It’s irrelevant which you use, the browserworld is or dominate or sponsored by Google, the loser always is the user in those browsers which make money with tracking (read the TOS and PP of Firefox/Mozilla and you will see that they are not better. Well, they are not the worse certainly).
That is the Problem, FOSS or not, it has nothing to do with this., the problem is the lack of privacy and the surveillance which kills the free internet.
Google absolutely can and is influencing the development of Chromium. While the source is public, the development is very clearly tightly controlled by Google who decide on what features end up in Chromium, what patches they accept, and so on. It’s of course possible to fork Chromium, but at that point the amount of work would be similar to what Mozilla has to put into developing Firefox.
You keep repeating that Google hasn’t significantly modified the workings of the engine so far in a way that prevents Vivaldi from easily working around. However, it’s a logical fallacy to extrapolate from the fact that this hasn’t happened that it will not happen in a future.
Vivaldi directly depends on the code that Google is producing while Firefox does not. This makes Firefox strictly preferable to Vivaldi.
At this point we’re just going in circles, repeating the same thing over and over. So, I don’t see the point of continuing the conversation.
Ok, and who tells you that he is not going to do it with Mozilla? This would be even easier for Google, he just have to stop supporting it and provide the necessary APIs that Firefox also uses.
In this way he will directly dominate the entire browser market and he do not need to confront Microsoft, which also uses Chromium.
Firefox forks don’t really count for anything and will disappear from the market, adding to the list of discontinued, like the other 70 before them.
No, the market does not work like that, it is a very common practice of large monopolies to create and support different companies that are supposedly competitors, thus creating a supposed variety that does not exist in reality. Thus controlling the entire market.
Disabling Chromium for others will only result in a self-shot.
One Example of something similar:
It also happens in other product areas. Due to the unethical ethics of the Nestlé company, many sought to boycott the products of this multinational company.
But it turns out that this is not so simple, since apart from the famous Nescafé, it also owns other coffee brands, for example Bonca, not even counting the private labels that also come out of its production. He also owns several brands of animal feed, cocoa, different brands of chocolate, sweets and even various brands of bottled water and other aliments. The list is kilometer long and covers almost half of any supermarket.
That is, the intend to boicot Google using Firefox or other Mozilla fork, is like boicot a Nescafé, buying Bonca or one of it private labels. That change nothing, because it isn’t the cause of the problem.
Combating this problem is not about staying stuck in one product or another, but about combating the bad practices used by all major browsers, Firefox included.
It does not serve to combat a product, using another that does the same, but to boycott everyone who uses these practices, using those who do not.
From being active in initiatives to require legislators to ban these practices, this is the way to go.
Recently, the Norwegian Consumer Council published a report calling for a ban on surveillance-based ads. In solidarity, we the undersigned have sent the following letter on Wednesday, July 7th, to EU and US regulators to encourage them to take action during legislative sessions and any relevant privacy discussions.
TIME TO BAN SURVEILLANCE-BASED ADVERTISING
Surveillance-based advertising permeates the internet today, creating a number of highly problematic issues for both consumers and businesses.
On June 23, a broad coalition of consumer rights organizations, civil rights groups, NGOs, as well as academics, researchers, privacy experts, and enthusiasts – all concerned individuals – called on regulators to stop the invasive and privacy-hostile practices related to surveillance-based advertising.
In the EU, they urged regulators to consider a ban on surveillance-based advertising as a part of the Digital Services Act. In the U.S., they urged legislators to enact comprehensive privacy legislation. We are a group of businesses who write to you today to show our support to this initiative. We represent small, medium, and large businesses who all believe – and demonstrate on a daily basis – that it is possible to run profitable companies without exploiting the privacy of individuals.
In addition to the clear privacy issues caused by surveillance-based advertising, it is also detrimental to the business landscape.
In the surveillance-based advertising model, a few actors can obtain competitive advantages by collecting data from across websites and services and dominant platform actors can abuse their positions by giving preference to their own services.
These practices seriously undermine competition and take revenue away from content creators. Anti-competitive behavior and effects serve to entrench dominant actors’ positions while complex supply chains and ineffective technologies lead to lost revenues for advertisers and publishers.
It is also difficult for consumers to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actors in the digital sphere, which means that legitimate actors, amongst them many small and medium-sized enterprises, are directly affected by the actions of unscrupulous companies.
This harms consumers and businesses and can undermine the cornerstones of democracy.
Although we recognize that advertising is an important source of revenue for content creators and publishers online, this does not justify the massive commercial surveillance systems set up in attempts to “show the right ad to the right people”.
Other forms of advertising technologies exist, which do not depend on spying on consumers, and alternative models can be implemented without significantly affecting revenue. On the contrary – and that we can attest to – businesses can thrive without privacy-invasive practices.
We encourage you to take a stand and ban surveillance-based advertising.
With kind regards,
Vivaldi Technologies, Jon von Tetzchner, CEO & Tatsuki Tomita, COO
Fastmail Pty Ltd, Bron Gondwana, CEO
Conva Ventures Inc., dba. Fathom Analytics, Jack Ellis & Paul Jarvis, Directors
Proton Technologies AG, Dr. Andy Yen, CEO
Tutao GmbH, dba. Tutanota, Matthias Pfau, Co-Founder and CEO
DuckDuckGo, Inc., Gabriel Weinberg, Founder and CEO
Disconnect Inc., Casey Oppenheim, Co-founder and CEO
Mojeek Limited, Colin Hayhurst, CEO
Ecosia GmbH, Christian Kroll, CEO
Startpage & StartMail, Robert E.G. Beens, Co-Founder and CEO
Nextcloud GmbH, Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO
Kobler, Erik Bugge, CEO
Strossle International, Håkon Tillier, CEO & Rickard Lawson, CMO
Mailfence, Patrick De Schutter, Co-Founder and Managing Director
Well, everyone has his point of seeing the problem, I can only argue as I see it.
Although I think we agree that the monitoring and tracking techniques of userdata for commercial purposes is strictly objectionable and that it should be changed to ensure a free internet, although we do not agree on the details.
In any case a pleasant chat, nowadays not so frequent in controversial subjects.
All the best
It is clear that Google in many Chromium updates, also adds some dirty trick to be able to track the user, but so far the Vivaldi Team has also eliminated it again, before releasing the update for users. They are very good at this.
About web formats, I am not talking about the fact that browsers can render a page or not, this is done by Gecko, Blink and WebKit more or less equally well, I am talking about different page formats that require one or another Google API, for example Crypto Tokens (It is a Google API that in Vivaldi can be deactivated in the configuration), without these it is not possible, for example, to log in on many pages, because they do not accept you as a safe browser.
Google does not need to lend a lot of hand to Chromium, if it is Google that today determines the web standards, no other. The vast majority of websites are oriented to these standards and use plug-ins from Google and others, whether you like it or not.
Again, this approach works for surface level changes in Chromium. Should Google make deeper structural changes, then the amount of work to maintain a fork would drastically increase. And what APIs are you suggesting can be turned off in Vivaldi that can’t be turned off in Firefox?
And you misunderstood my point regarding Chromium. I’m talking about things like ad blocker support that rely on Chromium design. Google is actively looking for ways to neuter such plugins right now. While, Chromium based browsers could be affected by this, Firefox is not dependent on internal workings of Chromium.
Vivaldi has its own ad and trackerblocker, with a list of expandable filters. It even uses filters that block these annoying Cookie pop-ups and Malware. As Chromium, of course, you can use extensions from the Chrome Store, but you can also install it from third-party sources, for example from GitHub or Sourceforge, among others, although most of the extensions are redundant, because Vivaldi includes them as its own functions. Do not confuse Vivaldi with other Chromium forks, which mainly limit themselves to just putting their own logo on a Chromium as is, nothing to do with it.
I just invite you to preview it and see for yourself that Vivaldi has nothing to do, not only with any other Chromium, or with any other browser on the market. More than a browser, it can almost be called an online productivity suite. It’s a democratic collaboration between users and the Vivaldi team, in a community as there are few (already more than 2 million users active internationally in this community.)
There is no guarantee that what Vivaldi implemented will continue being compatible with hwo Chromium works internally. These are surface level changes. You’re marketing Vivaldi, which is a commercial closed source product based on Google tech. I’m really not interested in it. I think we’ve said all there is to say about it at this point.
Vivaldi’s ‘Closed Source’ is only for commercial use precisely and is only a small part of the UI. It is accessible to users and modifiable by them, in the forum they even teach how to do it. Of course, the user can do this at his own risk. This only prevents the big Chromiums, Chrome, Edge and Opera from using it for their own purposes, although if in the latest versions of these it is seen that they try to copy it, adding bad copies of these functionalities. Closed Source in the sense that you can’t fork Vivaldi and publish it with another Brand (for the moment, there are internal discussions on this matter and perhaps in the future, when Vivaldi has achieved a certain strong percentage in the market, it can allow itself to go completely FOSS, for the moment it would be suicide)
As I said before, although Google can add certain things to Chromium, it cannot influence its development, since this would also mean having to revoke the status of FOSS to Chromium, which is nothing short of impossible and it will also have to face Microsoft and to Edge, which is not in Google’s interest at all.
What Google does is this, to add APIs, which Vivaldi removes, or to eliminate the ability to sync with Google’s servers, which has certainly broken the neck of a whole series of other Chromiums. But it turns out that Vivaldi has never used sync with Google servers, but always with its own servers with end to end encryption, Vivaldi itself has neither access to this data nor to the sync passwords. That is, if you lose your sync password, you cannot recover it, it is the price of privacy.
Where Google prefers to influence is in web standards, this is what it is mainly dedicated to, since, being the dominant company on the web, it knows that most of the pages are oriented to Google’s standards in its creation, that is why Blink currently has the best performance and compatibility with newer formats.
Meanwhile going with Firefox, also depends on Google (Yes) or using some firefox forks, which are most outdated, not very stable, also depending de Mozilla and with this de Google ore otherwise with Systeme One, even worse . It’s irrelevant which you use, the browserworld is or dominate or sponsored by Google, the loser always is the user in those browsers which make money with tracking (read the TOS and PP of Firefox/Mozilla and you will see that they are not better. Well, they are not the worse certainly). That is the Problem, FOSS or not, it has nothing to do with this., the problem is the lack of privacy and the surveillance which kills the free internet.
Google absolutely can and is influencing the development of Chromium. While the source is public, the development is very clearly tightly controlled by Google who decide on what features end up in Chromium, what patches they accept, and so on. It’s of course possible to fork Chromium, but at that point the amount of work would be similar to what Mozilla has to put into developing Firefox.
You keep repeating that Google hasn’t significantly modified the workings of the engine so far in a way that prevents Vivaldi from easily working around. However, it’s a logical fallacy to extrapolate from the fact that this hasn’t happened that it will not happen in a future.
Vivaldi directly depends on the code that Google is producing while Firefox does not. This makes Firefox strictly preferable to Vivaldi.
At this point we’re just going in circles, repeating the same thing over and over. So, I don’t see the point of continuing the conversation.
Have a good day.
Ok, and who tells you that he is not going to do it with Mozilla? This would be even easier for Google, he just have to stop supporting it and provide the necessary APIs that Firefox also uses. In this way he will directly dominate the entire browser market and he do not need to confront Microsoft, which also uses Chromium. Firefox forks don’t really count for anything and will disappear from the market, adding to the list of discontinued, like the other 70 before them.
No, the market does not work like that, it is a very common practice of large monopolies to create and support different companies that are supposedly competitors, thus creating a supposed variety that does not exist in reality. Thus controlling the entire market. Disabling Chromium for others will only result in a self-shot.
One Example of something similar: It also happens in other product areas. Due to the unethical ethics of the Nestlé company, many sought to boycott the products of this multinational company. But it turns out that this is not so simple, since apart from the famous Nescafé, it also owns other coffee brands, for example Bonca, not even counting the private labels that also come out of its production. He also owns several brands of animal feed, cocoa, different brands of chocolate, sweets and even various brands of bottled water and other aliments. The list is kilometer long and covers almost half of any supermarket.
That is, the intend to boicot Google using Firefox or other Mozilla fork, is like boicot a Nescafé, buying Bonca or one of it private labels. That change nothing, because it isn’t the cause of the problem.
Combating this problem is not about staying stuck in one product or another, but about combating the bad practices used by all major browsers, Firefox included. It does not serve to combat a product, using another that does the same, but to boycott everyone who uses these practices, using those who do not. From being active in initiatives to require legislators to ban these practices, this is the way to go.
Full letter in PDF https://www.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20210622-final-report-time-to-ban-surveillance-based-advertising.pdf
THIS is the way to go, all other in looking at the finger which pointed to the way without the Big Brother watching you in internet.
We fundamentally disagree here, and I’ve explained my position already.
Well, everyone has his point of seeing the problem, I can only argue as I see it. Although I think we agree that the monitoring and tracking techniques of userdata for commercial purposes is strictly objectionable and that it should be changed to ensure a free internet, although we do not agree on the details. In any case a pleasant chat, nowadays not so frequent in controversial subjects. All the best
PS A good site for your Bookmarks https://themarkup.org/series/blacklight