I’m looking into Firefox alternatives as I wanna see what’s available. Being Norwegian, Vivaldi seems like a good choice to replace Firefox on desktop and Safari on iOS. Tried it for a night and it works pretty good. I do however have reservations about it being based on Chromium.
How much power does Google actually have over Vivaldi? And would it actually matter for my quest for degoogling myself?
In case anyone’s wondering. I’m also looking into LibreWolf.
Edit: Rewrote the start as people got too hung up on Firefox.
I’ve been using LibreWolf and have been very happy with it.
I installed the essential Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin and see both doing their jobs on top of the protection LibreWolf offers.
Strongly second this.
There’s been suspicions for a while that you can’t actually unGoogle Chromium no matter how hard you try.
I really enjoy Vivaldi but I came to the conclusion that the only thing that really matters to me is vertical tabs.
LibreWolf is my daily driver now.
What specifically do you not like about the Firefox terms of use?
Because I just don’t see anything better about chromium. People are just throwing a fit because FF had to comply with legal requirements.
Here’s the exact phrase they used before changing it after people got pissed about it:
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
The new choice of words is a a lot better. But it makes me want to at least explore alternatives.
If you’re upset about that, you know nothing about IP law.
If you do not grant Firefox a license to use your information, the only thing they can legally do is destroy it. So no storing of bookmarks, usernames/passwords, search history, browsing history, no saving your open tabs so your next session picks up where the last ended, none of the things that we all expect of a modern browser. Without that, you’re basically left with just a URL bar with no search ability.
They’d gotten by without that clause for a while despite being technically illegal in the EU and California. And again: what’s the alternative? Chromium has the same thing, and no Firefox fork can exist without mainline Firefox.
You’re right, I know nothing about IP law.
However, I came here to ask for information about using a chromium browser, not a discussion about Mozilla’s choice of words in a TOS.
I’ll see if I can find back to the exact words I didn’t like. It’s been a few weeks at this point. It’s about data sharing. Not to mention the fact that American privacy laws aren’t as strict as what Vivaldi have to deal with here in Norway.
How much it _actually _ matters however. I don’t know.
Also, I’ve used Firefox for about 20 years, It would be nice to try something else, I guess.
Google does not benefit from your user data in Vivaldi.
The Chromium project is also mostly community driven and yes, Google has had a big hand in it, but it is in no way fully Google’s thing.
On paper.
I’ll look into that link later, thanks for sharing!
I’ve been using Orion on iOS and been happy with it so far
I also recommend Vivaldi.
I originally switched to Ecosia, loved it. Very identical to Chrome because, well, it’s chromium based. Still a food option, but I wanted to make a full swap.
So I reluctantly tried Vivaldi last week (with Ecosia as a search engine), because that’s 2 major changes to a browser this year, meaning migrating all data and setting stuff up, which is more bothersome than I have patience for under normal circumstances.
Yet, I must say I’m positively surprised by it. Loving Vivaldi so far, and I’m not even using all it has to offer.
Orion.
