Hi folks. As you know, Vivaldi is a partially open source browser based on Chromium. They say that the closed source part is about the ui and peculiar features in the browser. I am aware of their privacy policy, the unique identifiers etc. But I would like to learn about if the closed sourced part is important, or not.
I mean if you can see the core functions in the open source code and cannot inspect the code about UI and other stuff, is it a problem or not. Or, is it possible to distinguish the code about ui and other parts which is relevant to our privacy?
I don’t have first hand knowledge of this browser, but the above ^ is exactly the type of stuff that seems like it would benefit most from being open source (from a security and bugspotting/bugfixing point of view)
I am not talking about privacy and security here, but I think the “partially open source” stuff is a meme. Ofc it’s going to be partially open source, because chromium itself is open source. Are we also going to say that edge/chrome is “partially open source” ?
That is why I asked the question since I don’t have any coding knowledge. Is there any kind of mechanism that can be used to verify that closed source part of Vivaldi is not making any additional connection or collecting personal data if those components/parts are only intended for UI and feature improvements?
I was also a Brave user, and switched to Vivaldi. It’s much more powerful, it’s transparent (tells people if there’s an issue and also if that is their bad), and you can do a lot of things (even making it like Brave, especially if you know CSS). Also, it has affiliate links too, but you can switch them off at any time and very easily, unlike Brave.
It has a so-and-so ad blocker (not as good as Brave’s), but you can add your blocking sources.
but they absolutely are like the 1Password of Browsers, wtf you mean.
Double standard ain’t gonna cut it here.
Neither is brave perfect to be frank but each have their pros and cons.
First of all, Vivaldi has a very good Privacy Policy. And they have never had incidents regarding any privacy concerns AFAIK.
Also, it is amazingly powerful. I mean, you can’t do in any other browser all the things you can do in it. And it’s adding more and more features (and improving the existing ones).
It’s community-based and helped by volunteers. Doesn’t this say anything to you?
@SkewedZeppelin OK, and now, the most important part, IMO:
only part of its UI is closed-source because that’s its most important part, that makes it unique. They actually needed to make it closed-source.
