I have used tools like this in the past, to track how I spend my time while browsing.
I made it a habit to look at the tool after a session of browsing, and try to understand if my browsing was productive or not. Then try to think what I would to differently the next time.
This can help improving your browsing habits.
Now, the title feels a bit like clickbait (had to click to get an idea of what it was about).
As nice as all the features they've added are, I can't help but see Vivaldi as "Chromium but Blink probably isn't completely up to date", and it worries me more than a little to use a browser where the latest (potentially high impact) changes to the browser rendering engine aren't remedied until the next browser patch.
I'm using Vivaldi since first public release and I haven't encountered any issue regarding to Blink stability.
I'm using only newest snapshots (so they should be considered unstable) as my daily work & private browser and never had a reason to roll back. IIRC they using even nightlies from Blink in their snapshots, so "getting behind" shouldn't be considered a problem I think.
But putting everything aside, let's assume they're 40 days behind Blink always - are you THAT geeky that you need these new Blink features instantly, when noone actually implements them anywhere (I'm taking about new JS stuff for example), because noone would be able to use this features, as this is cutting-edge-blink-only-feature?
It's good to see a company trying to push browsers forward again. Seems like once again things have stagnated a bit with the current browser experiences.
While I rarely looked at the code behind a browser (mostly webkit, to debug some weird stuff with capybara-webkit), it is highly uncomfortable to me to use a non-free browser... Does it track my behavior, do they sell that information - I don't have time to mess around with Wireshark and see what it does;
On the "history" upgrade idea - that's a really cool one; It's quite often that I'm looking for that page I accessed last year, or that youtube video somebody sent me a few months ago, and I forgot it's name - hopefully chromium/firefox steal this idea and improve upon it;
There's a middle ground between FOSS and closed source, like having the source code open, and let power users compile it themselves, while keeping the copy-rights. Most code on the web works like this, as you can just right click and "view source", and easily debug and inspect.
Does anyone have any experience with open sourcing, but with a restrictive (all rights reserved) license ? And would this be enough for people like the parent poster to run such a software ?
Your argument about the closed source is weak. Messing around with Wireshark is probably quicker than reading thousands of locs.
I understand the value of open source. But I'm still not sure if it matters. A lot of people think that open source software does not track personal data. But how do they know? Have they read all the code? Do they even understand all code?
It's much easier to run Wireshark to check what the program does. That's how the world found out about what Windows 10 is sending to MS.
I don't believe wireshark will tell you that much since everything is encrypted with forward secrecy nowadays. So the browser would need to be able to output negotiated keys for data tracking connections. That seems unlikely, especially if what's being tracked is a bit shady.
Open-source doesn't just mean that you can view the source code. It also means that anyone can take the source code, make changes to it and distribute their new version.
This means that if an open-source project does nefarious things, there's a good chance that a fork will come along and that people will start using that fork instead. So, you yourself don't have to read every single line of code for it to be relatively certain that an open-source project does not do bad things.
There are of course exceptions to this. For example there are a lot of things that a lot of people are not fond of with Chromium. There are forks which try to address this (for example [0]), but Google has so much development workforce behind Chromium that such a fork has a hard time keeping up with merging security patches and updates in general.
But even in that case, open-source offers protection without you reading every line of code. Because there's people out there who earn their daily bread by uncovering these sort of things: Journalists.
Due to the source code being available, they have definitive proof and can slap these kind of stories on the front page. I mean, heck, Heart Bleed came on national TV in my country. If that vulnerability had been in closed-source software, they could have only ever reported about rumors.
I think the difference is that with open source there's a chance that one could find out about tracking, fix it, then continue to use the product. With a closed source solution, this is almost impossible.
Besides that, as far as I remember that link only discloses their changes to Chromium, not everything that's part of Vivaldi. From what I've heard, the rest can apparently be extracted from the Vivaldi binary, but I have yet to see a demonstration of someone actually compiling Vivaldi from that.
What happens tomorrow, if Vivaldi becomes history? Do we own this data? How is it stored? Where is it located? Can we access this with any other tool?
I know I'm begging for down-votes but I simply cannot understand how people can commit something as personal as web browsing to a closed source solution.
Excuse me but I am just reading on this and it seems its real open source it that sense. I did not even know this, so thank you for this. This makes Vivaldi a total no go for me.
"18 November 2016. "Subject to the terms and conditions herein, Vivaldi hereby grants You a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to install and use the Software and Services for its intended purpose. [...] Without limiting the foregoing, you are neither allowed to (a) adapt, alter, translate, embed into any other product or otherwise create derivative works of, or otherwise modify the Software ; (b) separate the component programs of the Software for use on different computers; (c) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software, except as permitted by applicable law; or (d) remove, alter or obscure any proprietary notices on the Software or the applicable documentation therein."
The license in the LICENSE file looks like BSD 2.0. The proprietary license you mention is only in the Windows installer (according a quick grep) ... but it's still legally murky in my uneducated opinion.
Anyway, license notwithstanding, they do not publish the latest source. The download page has version 1.8, whose source is not available for download. There is also no repository and so no public history of changes on a per-commit basis. It might technically be open source, but certainly not in spirit.
CEO Quote from the above link.
"In addition, all of our UI code (included in normal packages) is written in plain, readable text. This means that all parts of Vivaldi are full audit-able and open from that perspective." So in other words. No that code is NOT open source. And he can stuck his "open from that perspective." BS up his ass. I am not gonna use stuff from people who do crap like this.
AFAIK the Wikipedia page for Vivaldi says its proprietary for a reason. And I don't think that reason is because of a windows installer. They release their code they build on top of chromium as open source BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO. But they build looks like they build other stuff that is "open" but not open source. At least this is what I have got from my quick look at it. This seems to follow a Opera and Chrome tradition. Even Chrome is not open source. Its 99% Chromium +1% Google crap on top of it. I am very opposed to this kind of stuff and for Opera and Vivaldi thats not just 1%.
Happy to get corrected of better educated on this.
That's a great privacy policy! It's brief and clearly worded.
I'd been holding off on using Vivaldi because I wanted to know exactly what information was being collected. I tried to find the privacy policy on their site, but could only find the one regarding the data their website collects.
To the Vivaldi team: You might consider making this privacy policy more prominent on your site. Not being able to find it was literally the only reason I hadn't tried your browser until now.
One so-far-unsolved problem for me in browsers is how to make using multiple profiles at the same time smooth without adding many windows to desktop.
I'm using Chrome and run several profiles: personal, work, social media etc. Since I tend to use all of these throughout the day, I have several browser windows and several tabs. This is not very convenient. I would prefer system where I could share the same window with multiple profiles, maybe even having a list a combined list of tabs from different profiles on the left side.
Mozilla is actually working on this for Firefox, and you can try it right now through their Test Pilot extension. I've been using it for a while now and it's pretty great: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers
Vivaldi looks so stable and rock solid, uses Blink engine, although the title is a clickbait. About the history feature, if a website is important i will bookmark it, i want history only for that session, not save it for future search, again that's my opinion. However the features like tab muting, taking notes are very good and that's what the user needs. Wish it would have been Open Source. I prefer Vivaldi over IE. But Firefox MasterRace!
> About the history feature, if a website is important i will bookmark it, i want history only for that session, not save it for future search, again that's my opinion.
100% on this, Though I will say it is a very cool feature.
Wouldn't it be great if the browser could be configured to simply sync this information to a calendar app of your choosing?
This way, be it local or an online service like Google Calendar, the data would be under your control and would make sense across computers, and could be viewed in relation to other time-based data.
i.e. if your tweets also ended up in a calendar you could see the tweets that led to a browse, that led to a bookmark, that led to a new tweet. You could later on make sense of your own activities.
If I were at Google, this is what I'd want to work on: How to bring together data to make it useful for the user, rather than just useful as part of a profile for advertisers. History is a lot less scary when it provides the user with the bulk of the value.
Meta: I find it odd that we live and work on an internet where everything we do is tracked and logged in fine detail. Huge companies do this every second of every day. Many folks, including me, don't like it. Each day my feed is full of news from these companies offering new products and services.
But when a new company comes along that is trying to break that cycle? Suddenly a ton of people pop out of the woodwork to warn us there might be a privacy concern.
Ok sure, but where the hell were you guys when Apple talked about it's new file system, or LG released new smart TVs, or when a dozen other newsworthy things happened in the last week from big companies who are scooping up all of our data? These are not companies that might scoop up data. These are companies that are already doing it.
Look, I'm full-bore tinfoil hat guy, but after watching this for years, there seems to be a lot of selective outrage going on online. Some folks get a free pass. Some folks get trashed for much less. I find that very odd.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 97.1 ms ] threadI made it a habit to look at the tool after a session of browsing, and try to understand if my browsing was productive or not. Then try to think what I would to differently the next time.
This can help improving your browsing habits.
Now, the title feels a bit like clickbait (had to click to get an idea of what it was about).
I'm using only newest snapshots (so they should be considered unstable) as my daily work & private browser and never had a reason to roll back. IIRC they using even nightlies from Blink in their snapshots, so "getting behind" shouldn't be considered a problem I think.
But putting everything aside, let's assume they're 40 days behind Blink always - are you THAT geeky that you need these new Blink features instantly, when noone actually implements them anywhere (I'm taking about new JS stuff for example), because noone would be able to use this features, as this is cutting-edge-blink-only-feature?
0: http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...
On the "history" upgrade idea - that's a really cool one; It's quite often that I'm looking for that page I accessed last year, or that youtube video somebody sent me a few months ago, and I forgot it's name - hopefully chromium/firefox steal this idea and improve upon it;
I understand the value of open source. But I'm still not sure if it matters. A lot of people think that open source software does not track personal data. But how do they know? Have they read all the code? Do they even understand all code?
It's much easier to run Wireshark to check what the program does. That's how the world found out about what Windows 10 is sending to MS.
In the end it's about trust.
This means that if an open-source project does nefarious things, there's a good chance that a fork will come along and that people will start using that fork instead. So, you yourself don't have to read every single line of code for it to be relatively certain that an open-source project does not do bad things.
There are of course exceptions to this. For example there are a lot of things that a lot of people are not fond of with Chromium. There are forks which try to address this (for example [0]), but Google has so much development workforce behind Chromium that such a fork has a hard time keeping up with merging security patches and updates in general.
But even in that case, open-source offers protection without you reading every line of code. Because there's people out there who earn their daily bread by uncovering these sort of things: Journalists.
Due to the source code being available, they have definitive proof and can slap these kind of stories on the front page. I mean, heck, Heart Bleed came on national TV in my country. If that vulnerability had been in closed-source software, they could have only ever reported about rumors.
[0]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
https://vivaldi.com/source
Besides that, as far as I remember that link only discloses their changes to Chromium, not everything that's part of Vivaldi. From what I've heard, the rest can apparently be extracted from the Vivaldi binary, but I have yet to see a demonstration of someone actually compiling Vivaldi from that.
https://github.com/ograycode/vivaldi-source
I know I'm begging for down-votes but I simply cannot understand how people can commit something as personal as web browsing to a closed source solution.
"Vivaldi Technologies doesn’t collect your history data. All of this information is strictly private and local to your computer."
https://vivaldi.com/source/
// later edit below
Excuse me but I am just reading on this and it seems its real open source it that sense. I did not even know this, so thank you for this. This makes Vivaldi a total no go for me.
https://vivaldi.net/userblogs/entry/a-few-words-about-open-s...
It has in fact a proprietary license:
"18 November 2016. "Subject to the terms and conditions herein, Vivaldi hereby grants You a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to install and use the Software and Services for its intended purpose. [...] Without limiting the foregoing, you are neither allowed to (a) adapt, alter, translate, embed into any other product or otherwise create derivative works of, or otherwise modify the Software ; (b) separate the component programs of the Software for use on different computers; (c) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software, except as permitted by applicable law; or (d) remove, alter or obscure any proprietary notices on the Software or the applicable documentation therein."
Anyway, license notwithstanding, they do not publish the latest source. The download page has version 1.8, whose source is not available for download. There is also no repository and so no public history of changes on a per-commit basis. It might technically be open source, but certainly not in spirit.
AFAIK the Wikipedia page for Vivaldi says its proprietary for a reason. And I don't think that reason is because of a windows installer. They release their code they build on top of chromium as open source BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO. But they build looks like they build other stuff that is "open" but not open source. At least this is what I have got from my quick look at it. This seems to follow a Opera and Chrome tradition. Even Chrome is not open source. Its 99% Chromium +1% Google crap on top of it. I am very opposed to this kind of stuff and for Opera and Vivaldi thats not just 1%.
Happy to get corrected of better educated on this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/
Not a sure thing obviously, but it's something I haven't seen mentioned yet here.
I'd been holding off on using Vivaldi because I wanted to know exactly what information was being collected. I tried to find the privacy policy on their site, but could only find the one regarding the data their website collects.
To the Vivaldi team: You might consider making this privacy policy more prominent on your site. Not being able to find it was literally the only reason I hadn't tried your browser until now.
I'm using Chrome and run several profiles: personal, work, social media etc. Since I tend to use all of these throughout the day, I have several browser windows and several tabs. This is not very convenient. I would prefer system where I could share the same window with multiple profiles, maybe even having a list a combined list of tabs from different profiles on the left side.
[0] https://ghostbrowser.com/
100% on this, Though I will say it is a very cool feature.
This way, be it local or an online service like Google Calendar, the data would be under your control and would make sense across computers, and could be viewed in relation to other time-based data.
i.e. if your tweets also ended up in a calendar you could see the tweets that led to a browse, that led to a bookmark, that led to a new tweet. You could later on make sense of your own activities.
If I were at Google, this is what I'd want to work on: How to bring together data to make it useful for the user, rather than just useful as part of a profile for advertisers. History is a lot less scary when it provides the user with the bulk of the value.
On the other hand, I'd argue that showing it at that level of detail to the user makes it more scary.
- I still won't use it because googling/favorites are faster.
- Somebody might find this useful if he/she wants to spy on the user.
Not sure if the time investment was worth it. I only use it as a reference browser.
But when a new company comes along that is trying to break that cycle? Suddenly a ton of people pop out of the woodwork to warn us there might be a privacy concern.
Ok sure, but where the hell were you guys when Apple talked about it's new file system, or LG released new smart TVs, or when a dozen other newsworthy things happened in the last week from big companies who are scooping up all of our data? These are not companies that might scoop up data. These are companies that are already doing it.
Look, I'm full-bore tinfoil hat guy, but after watching this for years, there seems to be a lot of selective outrage going on online. Some folks get a free pass. Some folks get trashed for much less. I find that very odd.