Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla’s Original Sin
Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.
I would definitely use Vivaldi if it wasn’t Chromium-based, but it is so a no-go from me.
@watson387 Isn’t Chromium, in an open-source way and far away from Google, a good choice?
Others have commented on the issues with Vivaldi, but do you have points on what you like about Vivaldi? People might suggest non-chromium browsers that do the same things
I’m not op, but these are some things that I appriciate about Vivaldi:
- Mouse gestures that work anywhere in the window with different options based on what I start the gesture on (eg. Right clicking on a link and dragging down opens the link in a new foreground tab {dragging down then up opens it in the background} but doing so on empty space opens a new tab)
- A scrollable side bar for tabs instead of the horizontal one that is standard (not in addition to or requiring hacky workarounds)
- The ability to minimize tabs or send them to the bottom of the cycle order (this needs to be able to be done with mouse gestures)
- The ability to easily highlight parts of a link so that I can copy part of the text (Vivaldi highlights with a click and drag and drags the link on a click, hold and drag; Firefox doesn’t appear to do either)
- Not having to worry about third party extensions security issues or having this core functionality stop working because the extension maintainer has to update it for the new browser version.
- The fact that it just works with minimal configuration
Unfortunately I am looking for alternatives to Vivaldi since Google has decided to kill quality web browsing on Chromium browsers. Much of the web is virtually unusable to me without a tool like ublock quieting things down to work past my sensory processing issues. At times it is hard to think that the majority of web devs have anything but distain for disabled people.
I do use Fennic on Android (with ublock and darkreader) because Mozilla decided to block access to about:config in the mobile version and I have yet to find another way to always force pages to load the desktop version. (Mobile versions of sites disable most of the built in accessibility options like the ability to zoom)
The settings I set in fennic if anyone is curious:
- browser.viewport.defaultZoom (set a sane default zoom)
- browser.viewport desktopWidth (say that the screen is large enough to not trigger CSS mobille layouts)
- general.useragent.override (work around browser sniffing; I’ve yet to find an extension that actually works for this)
Vivaldi is good in some ways (I miss the old Opera and Vivaldi is a spiritual successor to it), but we really don’t need more Chromium-based browsers in the world. It’s becoming a Chromium monoculture, which is bad for the web.
If you want to use a different browser, try Librewolf.
Vivaldi is even worse: Unlike Firefox, its proprietariness doesn’t end at a closed-source DRM binary blob.
In fact every Chromium-based browser is worse than Firefox: Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening
