No Google Topics in Vivaldi

I’m disappointed by the tech community’s acceptance of privacy invasions, and it’s denial of the long-term corrosive societal effects of the surveillance economy. I’m not surprised however. Quoting Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer, hell even Microsoft threw in behind it, they like spyware-ish telemetry, so why not. What is sad is more and more common websites simply don't work in Firefox anymore (chase.com), so it's literally back to the days of running in IE6 or nothing, but Chrome is now that pestilence.

I worked at Opera for a long time before it went Chinese, most of the time with Jon as CEO.<p>Best as I can tell: Jon von Tetzchner always had one primary goal - to become an industry titan, primarily like Bill Gates.<p>He founded Vivaldi after he was was thrown out by Opera&#x27;s board in 2010.<p>I don&#x27;t have any insight into why that happened, but I do know that at that time he was a terrible leader who simply wasn&#x27;t able to prioritize and scope at all. Exactly anything that was &quot;good&quot; had the highest priority.<p>For the sake of his employees at Vivaldi, I really do hope that he has gone through some personal developments since then.<p>He did have a bunch of positive traits too! Can&#x27;t tell in detail without exposing myself though.

How convenient. Vivaldi relies on Google building Chrome using some of the money they make thanks to their dark patterns. They can just take Chrome when it&#x27;s built and disable the dark patterns.<p>But by further spreading Blink, they are part of the issue.<p>Disabling Topics is nice for their users. In the short term at least. And they should, of course. They have nothing to gain from leaving this misfeature enabled.<p>But Vivaldi: we don&#x27;t need you to help Google in their browser dominance. This browser dominance is exactly why Google can pull such a feature out from their ass in the first place.

Have been using Vivaldi for a couple years now, and am mostly happy with it. It performs well with many tabs open, and is insanely configurable. It feels a little bit like the old Mozilla browser before Firefox, cuz it&#x27;s got the kitchen sink, but the configurability allows you to pare it down. Great to see they take privacy seriously also.

What&#x27;s going to be interesting is the day that websites start to block users <i>not</i> providing data from this Topics API.<p>&quot;We need to make money to operate this service and we can&#x27;t support users who won&#x27;t help us do that&quot;, or something to that effect.<p>I give it six months.

How long until big websites start implementing feature detection to block browsers without this API?

Also another reason to run a network wide ad blocker like AdGuard or pihole. Even if this tracking works it’s way through the ads will be useless if they don’t make it inside your network.

I like Vivaldi because they play a lot with their own unique creative ideas and they are not affraid to do it. while other big companies becomes very conservative about the way they change

There&#x27;s a simple option to disable this in Chrome:<p>chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;settings&#x2F;adPrivacy&#x2F;interests

I feel like the main issue is the lack of diversity in browsers more than Chrome pushing forward the interests of its parent company. If we had more than a few browsers, the situation would be less precarious. I would go even further and say that the situation would be better if any developer could just build his own browser in a few weekends. Perhaps internet’s resilience and privacy resides in so many browsers that you cannot possibly control them all. If so, the main issue to solve would not be Chrome but the complexity and herculean task of writing software capable of running the complete web specification.

So there, another reason I&#x27;m liking Vivaldi more and more.

vivaldi android is currently my preferred browser.<p>firefox on the linux desktop.<p>These guys simply rock.

Seems like a weird choice to build your entire product on such a hostile underlying.

What is stopping user from modifying API response and sending a list of nonsense topics or randomizing them as often as possible?

This feature should be referred to as &quot;Google Big Brother&quot;, or something similar, and pushed as a meme. Suggestions?

Time for another round of &#x27;I told you so&#x27; for expecting any different from a browser made by a company that runs on selling user data to advertisers for fun and profit. I&#x27;ve shunned Chrome and its various Blink based bastard spawn (including Firefox for the last 12 years, they may as well have dumped Gecko for Blink at this point) like the plague right from 2008 for precisely this reason.

I just switched to Vivaldi yesterday!<p>So far so good. The extension support is great.