Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and founder of Vivaldi Technologies, refuses to integrate AI features in its browser and wants human engineers, not AI, to write its code.
Yeah, loved Vivaldi until it started randomly corrupting my profiles after not starting up correctly. Now I’m back on Firefox -_-
They’re right. Vivaldi is based
based af. I’m installing Vivaldi right now, holy shit.
It’s Chromium based.
I’m uninstalling it right now!
I use AI on a daily basis and I don’t want AI in my browser. The desire to integrate AI into everything is not smart.
also, yall stop saying firefox sucks because all web browsers capable of the bloated standards are de facto corporate controlled
I kinda find this idea cool like theres other browsers like Firefox that makes AI optional to choose
Tetzchner says the company asked its users whether they wanted added AI features, and the response was “no.”
Revolutionary technique, asking if anyone wants a feature before you go all-in on it.
I just vibe code my own browser, with blackjack and hookers.
Build Vivaldi on top of Firefox rather than Chrome, and I’m in.
Just use Firefox. It doesn’t have any AI built into it as far as I’m aware.
Unfortunately, vanilla Firefox does have AI built-in, as well as a lot of other garbage. Librewolf is a fork that strips out all that junk, and it bundles in some cool security features as well.
But apparently Vivaldi is good, too.
Then you may not be aware that it is has integrated AI features.
Its got a whole panel that pops open when you click the button in upper left corner under the tabs.
AI is just a more destructive and environmentally catastrophic NFT.
Bro looked at steams pro consumer behavior and thought “hmm, I wonder if I could do that too?”
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remember when they let Homer design a car?
same shit happens when users get to design software.
This ai stuff is like the new clippy the paperclip, GTFO of my phone.
I don’t want features just rolled out without my consent.
Long term I will have to install custom roms and get bank cards from my bank again thanks to AI.
I hate the fact that it’s so hard to buy an android phone without it coming with a load of proprietary apps that I can’t remove. If I want their casino shit, their stupid health apps, whatever - I’ll download it myself. Being unable to uninstall it really pisses me off. I’m pretty sure it’s practically malware. And the AI shit is just as bad - phone I’m on now came with at least 3 different AI apps for whatever. I did actually manage to remove two, but they keep trying to reinstall, could be hiding behind my launcher. And I bought this phone 2 years ago, I can only imagine it’s even harder to get away from these days.
Maybe I’m out of touch, but I think most people just want an operating system and the opportunity to install what they want on it.
One of the happy accidents that has come from American technofascism is this rennaisance of open-source programming and development and a renewed interest in digital sovereignty. People have been building alternatives to what the tech oligarchs have been cramming down our throats, and it’s not only more secure and more functional, it’s getting more and more accessible to the public.
Take Graphene and PostmarketOS for instance. They’re both extremely easy to install on the right hardware. I haven’t had any complaints yet! :)
I mean, much of it meets all the criteria to be called malware, so it is “walking like a duck” and “quacking like a duck”.
All that bloat is typically cross-marketing agreements made with the makers of those apps to subsidize the phone’s cost without user consent. The part that I find weird is that there have been almost no marketing trials from major players testing the waters to see how much of a market there is for the same products that are not subsidized in this way, available at “full price”. Maybe they’re afraid that would draw too much attention to how atrocious the existing offerings are by comparison. It might put the privacy discussion more into the public discourse, which could be bad for their “business model”.
Yeah, agreed. My suspicion is that the major players have considered this and decided that the value of the customer data they gain from their bullshit malware apps is more than they would make by selling a clean phone, even at premium prices. I don’t know how the numbers break down, but I’m sure they do and they are probably right. Maybe most people would rather have a cheap phone full of tacky bullshit. It would be nice to have the choice tho!
This guy is my new hero.
I really hope Vivaldi stays good. It’s basically the only browser I’m considering usable. I’ll make do with something else in a pinch, but surfing the web without Vivaldi is like not having a hand.
I’m using it for stuff that doesn’t work without Chromium (like a translation tool that doesn’t break SPA forms) but yeah not being able to use my custom adblockers concerns me.
Same. If it weren’t a Chromium browser I’d explore it more, it seems to have a lot of neat options.
Waterfox is better, it’s open source, not based on chromium and has a split DNS resolution path through their own servers and cloudlfare. A few tweaks in about:config and it’s by far the best option out there.
I’ve liked Librewolf so far. I haven’t tried Waterfox yet.
What are some of your about:config tweaks?
There are several, depending on your level of paranoia, you may want to only change a few or go deep into the rabbit hole. Basically when you install waterfox, you should first check the regular settings, for example, strict enhanced traffic protection in the privacy and security tab is a good start, there are more in other tabs that you can navigate quite easily and are pretty straightforward.
In about:config, one of the most important is geo.enabled, this one should definitely be set to false, it’s even recommended on the arch Linux wiki. You can also set both privacy.fingerprintingProtection and privacy.resistFingerprinting to true (the second one will, among other things, set your local clock static at UTC 0, so the payload you send out will always show UTC timezone, wherever you are). However, keep in mind that the second one will also break some websites that you’ll visit as well as slowing down your browsing experience a bit.
In the end it’s always a trade off between privacy and convenience, so you can explore and see the config that works best for your particular case.
Sure it is. Does it have mouse gestures?
And it’s also free of AI.
The repo has a CLAUDE.md brother
