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.
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.
For anyone saying it’s Chromium based as a reason to not use it: how is Mozilla any better at this point? Can you point to anything notable and positive that Mozilla has done in the past idk 10 years or so? They won’t even include adblocking with their browser our of fear they lose Google’s support.
Ad-blocker extensions aren’t crippled, browsers are fully open source including cloud services instead of Google’s open core model and Mozilla has a better track record on this sort of stuff. Also technically Firefox does have built-in ad blocking capabilities now but for some reason there isn’t a UI for it yet.
I’d consider not making adblocking built in part of the browser to be crippling the browser, who wants that? But if Mozilla did include it they’d lose millions in funding from guess who.
If you go to
about:configand enableprivacy.trackingprotection.content.protection.enabled, then you can add the blocklists toprivacy.trackingprotection.content.protection.test_list_urlsand use the built-in adblocker. I think Waterfox also builts a UI on top of this.Interesting feature but you lost 90% of users at “if you go to about:config”, Meanwhile since 2020 when you first launch vivalidi they just ask if you want to enable it
Who values their users more, the advertising company that has been shoveling in unwanted features to their browser for over a decade while leaving the most wanted one behind “about:config” or a 3rd party extension, or the one who’s browser actually has features people actually asked for?
Waterfox is great, hopefully they can continue without google’s support whenever google decided to pull the plug on firefox now that they no longer need it as anti-trust insurance.
Maintaining a viable cross platform 3rd party browser with proper extensions support including Ublock and strict tracking controls?
It’s not “proper extensions support” if they don’t work half the time, and start working only after the website is loaded. Breaks gestures support completely, for instance.
Firefox is great, don’t get me wrong, but there’s A LOT wrong with its extensions system.
None of that is unique to Firefox though. Vivaldi has all those features too and adblock don’t even require an extension its just built in, Mozilla doesn’t even include adblocking by default.
An additional engine is important because otherwise the implementation becomes the standard instead of the engine following the standard. That is a risk to further competition. We saw that when IE won too hard over Netscape.