It's better than nothing but it's still far behind uBlock Origin or even the Brave's built-in ad blocker. Their decision to stop supporting uBlock Origin made me drop it as my alternative browser.
I have a question. My ISP, allegedly, knows what websites I go to. So why can't I pay my ISP an optional $20 a month that gets evenly distributed directly to those websites, in exchange for an ad-free web experience?
Surely I'm not creating much more than $20 in ad revenue in total per month, right? Can't we just cut out the middleman and all walk away happy?
I'm not sure why your ISP should be involved. Ideally they don't know what sites you're visiting. Your browser knows, though. And what you're describing is kind of what Brave tried to do with BAT (and kind of failed at).
This[1] claims the average American is worth about $1605/year in ad revenue. It's a model, so it's certainly possible it is significantly off. That said if there was a credible system like this, I'd happily pay for even the right partial offering.
This reminds me I have to see what's up with my install. Tried running earlier and got a message that it's secure store is busted, and have options to switch profile or continue and lose data, and all profiles are similarly broken. Luckily I don't keep much in it beyond sites like GMail and anything else not very Firefox friendly. Hoping this doesn't mean I lose access to my Google account as it's only logged in there.
I'm the kind of person who reinstalls linux to change distro and copies over my installation folder for my browser. A long time ago (back when it released in 2014/5) I would do this with windows too. Usually I would get to keep my browser perfectly intact, tabs and all.
That's harder on Linux, with Windows I usually had to only copy appdata for the user and everything would be flawless. I don't know exactly what's different with Linux Vivaldi installs, but it almost always breaks like this.
There are Singleton lock files in .config/vivaldi[-snapshot] that can be deleted if the profiles aren't protected by a keyring.
If the profiles are protected by either KWallet or Gnome-libsecret, you need to unlock that keyring before starting Vivaldi. If you moved to a KDE or Gnome desktop environment from something like Niri or Hyprland, or vice versa, this can happen.
With Vivaldi closed, back up ~/.config/vivaldi/ or ~/.config/vivaldi-snapshot, then try launching with the original backend:
vivaldi-stable --password-store=kwallet6
vivaldi-stable --password-store=kwallet5
vivaldi-stable --password-store=gnome-libsecret
vivaldi-stable --password-store=basic (only if the original profile used it; not recommended for regular use) I had to do this when I went from Hyprland to KDE Plasma and KDE Wallet made it so I couldn't open Vivaldi when I logged into the Hyprland session.
For KWallet/libsecret, the original wallet must also be available and unlocked.
Give Ardia a try, its the closest I've seen to get an Arc like experience from a fully open source browser. Some small bugs still but development is very active and fixes are coming rapidly.
Is it just me or is it a bit sad that even GPL'd software has websites that are full of Claudisms these days?
Like have some pride when showing off your project. Write a few sentences. Why should I give a shit about your project when you don't even care enough to describe it in your own words?
You can. You can also try out Ladybird or any of the Fx's forks.
I quit Firefox after a long ride because I got tired of slow loading times, and scrolling that I wasn't able to fix. No matter the settings it's still not as good as in Chrome.
For me Vivaldi on Linux has a 50% probability of freezing whenever I use Ctrl+F and type some text I am looking for, requiring killing and restarting the process.
It's been the case for years but I keep putting up with it because I can't live without side panels. No issues on Windows and MacOS.
I wouldn't publicly admit to doing things like this. Willingly foregoing updates for internet-connected software (especially your web user agent) is considered harmful.
You could be using Firefox with MV2 extensions instead which would sound far less ridiculous than "I am using Vivaldi (Chromium) while refusing to (ever) update it"
I checked it, and 8.1, 8.2 and the latest 8.3 all support Mv2 extensions (tested with uBlock Origin, uMatrix and some other niche extensions I use). Don't know where you got the info about 8.0 being the last to support mv2, but it's clearly wrong :D
> Don't know where you got the info about 8.0 being the last to support mv2
I updated to whatever the next version was, and it disabled all my MV2 extensions (mainly uBO). I figured that they kept MV2 support going as long as they could, and there was recently a patch by Google that removed the support for good, so that must be the end of it. So I downgraded back.
Did you have to do anything to reenable MV2 extensions? Or maybe it was a just bug they fixed later?
This was true, temporarily with some snapshot builds, for whatever reason. At some point MV2 extensions started to work again. That said, I imagine there will be a point where keeping MV2 working would be untenable. I seem to remember reading something that indicated that that was why they were beefing up the internal ad-blocker.
In that forum it says that you must edit the parameters of the command line with which Vivaldi is launched by your graphic desktop to get scrolling, if that is what you want.
I am pretty sure that the middle mouse button is not broken in Vivaldi on Linux.
It probably just has a different default behavior than what you expect, e.g. the middle button might have been allocated by default to mouse gestures, not to clipboard or scrolling or whatever you expect.
I am using Vivaldi, but I do not remember which was its default behavior, because I no longer use mice, but a stylus on a small graphic tablet, and I reconfigured Vivaldi for the buttons of my Wacom stylus.
In any case, if I had been using a mouse, I would have wanted to allocate the middle button to mouse gestures, because those are much more useful than the uses of the middle button for the X clipboard or for scrolling.
For me, Vivaldi has 2 major advantages in comparison with Firefox and Chrome, which I also use.
One is that Vivaldi can be controlled with mouse gestures. Mouse gestures can provide a much more convenient user interface for most GUI programs (by avoiding to switch your hand between mouse and keyboard), but unfortunately very few programs have been using them.
The other is even more important for me. The Vivaldi command to print a Web page frequently functions correctly, i.e. what is rendered in the printed file is the same as what the browser renders on the computer display.
In contrast, both Firefox and Chrome almost never render correctly a printed Web page, even if they render it correctly on the display. In Firefox and Chrome the printed page is usually corrupted, with various graphic elements scaled and moved in a different way than on screen, so they overlap over each other.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] threadSurely I'm not creating much more than $20 in ad revenue in total per month, right? Can't we just cut out the middleman and all walk away happy?
[1] https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google
It was about how the default keyring was called, and that the name of the keyring ia actually case sensitive.
That's harder on Linux, with Windows I usually had to only copy appdata for the user and everything would be flawless. I don't know exactly what's different with Linux Vivaldi installs, but it almost always breaks like this.
There are Singleton lock files in .config/vivaldi[-snapshot] that can be deleted if the profiles aren't protected by a keyring.
If the profiles are protected by either KWallet or Gnome-libsecret, you need to unlock that keyring before starting Vivaldi. If you moved to a KDE or Gnome desktop environment from something like Niri or Hyprland, or vice versa, this can happen.
With Vivaldi closed, back up ~/.config/vivaldi/ or ~/.config/vivaldi-snapshot, then try launching with the original backend:
vivaldi-stable --password-store=kwallet6
vivaldi-stable --password-store=kwallet5
vivaldi-stable --password-store=gnome-libsecret
vivaldi-stable --password-store=basic (only if the original profile used it; not recommended for regular use) I had to do this when I went from Hyprland to KDE Plasma and KDE Wallet made it so I couldn't open Vivaldi when I logged into the Hyprland session.
For KWallet/libsecret, the original wallet must also be available and unlocked.
It really is nice to have a browser from a company whose incentives seem to be for the actual users.
https://nordstjernen.org/index.html
Like have some pride when showing off your project. Write a few sentences. Why should I give a shit about your project when you don't even care enough to describe it in your own words?
The homepage mentions this:
"It ships no telemetry of any kind, and deliberately includes no AI assistant and no AI-style web APIs."
I am not sure the website is AI generated. Can you be more specific why you think this is the case?
It is apparently furtive slop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151418
I quit Firefox after a long ride because I got tired of slow loading times, and scrolling that I wasn't able to fix. No matter the settings it's still not as good as in Chrome.
HN hivemind, any ideas why?
In this environment, Vivaldi never freezes, regardless what you do.
So what you see is not related to Linux, but it is due to an interaction with something else that you use, perhaps Gnome, if you use it.
You could be using Firefox with MV2 extensions instead which would sound far less ridiculous than "I am using Vivaldi (Chromium) while refusing to (ever) update it"
I updated to whatever the next version was, and it disabled all my MV2 extensions (mainly uBO). I figured that they kept MV2 support going as long as they could, and there was recently a patch by Google that removed the support for good, so that must be the end of it. So I downgraded back.
Did you have to do anything to reenable MV2 extensions? Or maybe it was a just bug they fixed later?
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/102072/no-autoscroll-on-midd...
I am pretty sure that the middle mouse button is not broken in Vivaldi on Linux.
It probably just has a different default behavior than what you expect, e.g. the middle button might have been allocated by default to mouse gestures, not to clipboard or scrolling or whatever you expect.
I am using Vivaldi, but I do not remember which was its default behavior, because I no longer use mice, but a stylus on a small graphic tablet, and I reconfigured Vivaldi for the buttons of my Wacom stylus.
In any case, if I had been using a mouse, I would have wanted to allocate the middle button to mouse gestures, because those are much more useful than the uses of the middle button for the X clipboard or for scrolling.
One is that Vivaldi can be controlled with mouse gestures. Mouse gestures can provide a much more convenient user interface for most GUI programs (by avoiding to switch your hand between mouse and keyboard), but unfortunately very few programs have been using them.
The other is even more important for me. The Vivaldi command to print a Web page frequently functions correctly, i.e. what is rendered in the printed file is the same as what the browser renders on the computer display.
In contrast, both Firefox and Chrome almost never render correctly a printed Web page, even if they render it correctly on the display. In Firefox and Chrome the printed page is usually corrupted, with various graphic elements scaled and moved in a different way than on screen, so they overlap over each other.