New gecko based browsers are rare nowadays but this one is especially unique to me because it is more than just “firefox with tweaks” like a lot of the ones I’ve come across. The UI is different, it’s working on custom settings, a new more powerful sidebar, a new theming system, and potentially IPFS/Dat support further down the line. It’s very early in development but it’s still impressive as it is.
Any monopoly is wrong, but this is irrelevant in matters of the engine, as is also irrelevant who developed which engine or browser code, TOR and the Onion network was developed by the US defense and the NSA. The problem is much more complex and is to avoid the interference in our lives of large monopolies and develop techniques that can deal with them, the code used does not matter, if it does not carry the APIs that include Google, Facebook, MS or Others unrelated. It does not help me if I have to pay for my own server whose reliability I do not know or have to install my own server, which I also do not have, to get away from Google, Mozilla or any other American or Chinese server in the case of Opera. An exotic browser with an experimental engine that does not work on half of the pages I visit is also useless. I am served by an encrypted and secure and reliable synchronization that does not belong to any large company, but to a European cooperative, which even coincides with my political beliefs regarding the organization. I have other browsers, even FF forks, but these I use without sync and I have tried practically all existing browsers and I have stayed with Vivaldi for a simple reason, it is by far the most advanced and best I have ever tried, apart from the reasons that I mentioned before.
How do you know it’s encrypted and secure if you can’t look at the sourcecode?
You can proof it. If your lost your password, you can’t recover your data, because Vivaldi don’t has access to your password, nor at your data, that is the price of privacy. Not like in other sites with the option to recover your password. Apart in which server you can see it’s source code? The part of closed source in Vivaldi is refered to the UI and not user related. Vivaldi knows in which country I am, the OS I use and the version of Vivaldi I use, same statistic data which colect also FF, no privat data nor browser history or tracking, like Chrome, Edge or Opera. A good tool for test websites is Blacklight, you can add it also to your search engine list
https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=%sThat would only verify, that the data they sent you on that first request was encrypted with your password. And that only if you monitor the requests being made.
You can’t verify that the correct binary and/or script is running and that the server isn’t compromised thats true. Thats why people design “zero trust” applications. If you only ever send cyphertext to the server it can’t read anything without the key. If vivaldi was open source you could easily verify that that’s the case. Because it’s closed source you are forced to reverse engineer their binary if you want to be sure. Their EULA forbids this.
5% of the code referring to the UI is protected, the rest is OpenSource and everything is open for auditing. There is nothing hidden regarding privacy or user. What’s more, the modification of these codes by the user is even tolerated and explained in detail in the forum, where there is a sub-forum about it. Precisely Jon von Tetzchner, the founder of the Vivaldi cooperative and certainly not a stranger, has made his opinion very clear about the practices used by Google and the tracking of users, which he totally rejects.
Why?
No it is not. They try to disallow you from doing it in their EULA, even though they know that you are absolutely free to do so in many legislations. (“except as permitted by applicable law”)
Maybe you could ask him about his opinion on the shady companies they do business with?
Certainly Vivaldi is financed by different sponsors and search providers, whose links are included by default in Vivaldi, but all of these can be eliminated in the configuration if you don’t want them, just like Google’s APIs. See which other browsers allow you to do this, Mozilla? Regarding the protected part of Vivaldi, whose modifications are expressly tolerated by Vivaldi. What is not allowed to use it for other foreign browsers. For the user himself there is only the private rule ‘Do what you want with Vivaldi’.
https://jon.vivaldi.net/dont-let-monopolists-call-the-shots-save-the-internet/#more-40966