Comment by portmanteaufu
9 hours ago
I'd like to try Vivaldi, but the combination of being (partially) closed-source [1] and free-as-in-beer makes me feel like I must be the product.
Do they do any sort of third-party auditing of the closed parts?
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
source code is apparently* available to audit: https://vivaldi.com/source
* on my phone, can’t inspect the tars
Confusingly, that page only provides the changes to the Google Chromium source that allows their UI to run. (I'm not sure it would be easy to discern this without already knowing the source is not fully open.)
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-sou...
https://github.com/ric2b/Vivaldi-browser
Someone mirrored it.
Tarballs every 2 months, and we know these don't give you the Vivaldi browser as they supply it.
I don't trust them one bit. There was that telemetry analysis that showed Vivaldi as a very noisy browser.
> we know these don't give you the Vivaldi browser as they supply it.
how so? how do you know this?
3 replies →
In comparison to Google Chrome?
Im not sure I understand their business model. I don’t see any paid offering on their website
Took 2 seconds to startpage* this: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
*screw Google and their AI search
Guess I’m blind, I somehow missed it… thanks!
So the answer seems to be:
- search partnerships
- direct match partnerships
- bookmarks partnerships
- donation
- cut when people sign up for advertised products (proton vpn, not sure if others)
Or at least that was the case in 2019
Search engine deals are HUGE for browsers. They're e.g. what has funded Mozilla with many billions over the last 20 years. Mozilla has tried to diversify but everything else has pales in comparison (and the donations are basically a joke).
It scales up with usage as well. Not that Safari needed funding, but Google pays Apple upwards of $20,000,000,000 per year for the privilege of being the default for that user base.
A lot of people might think $20B is a lot to pay. But search (and “other”) account for over half (>$200B) the of Alphabet’s total revenue from all sources. It’s still a bargain when you consider how few people bother to (or are even aware of the possibility of) changing their default browser.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...