What are the differences between Vivaldi and Brave, technically and philosophically?
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Technically:
Vivaldi attempts to be an all-in-one program that includes RSS and email client and is designed as a highly customizable productivity browser. The ad-blocker is serviceable, but a lot of users boost it by adding extensions like uBlock Origin Lite or similar.Brave has a more developed ad-blocker. They include crypto tools, as Brave provides a program to earn crypto tokens by viewing ads supplied by Brave. They also include AI. There is access to the TOR network but is not as secure as the actual TOR browser. More privacy features, especially without modifications to either browser.
Philosophically:
Vivaldi does not include crypto or AI and the owner does not seem the least bit interested in doing so. There is some minor data collection to track browser (and likely feature) usage, but attempts to anonymize it. They do include some Google features initially but they can be turned off. There is some closed source UI code but it is somewhat auditable.Brave is open source but is very interested in crypto and AI. The owner has some... questionable views to some and the browser has a few controversies in the past: leaks in the TOR network, grabbing donation monies from crypto donations, and inserting their own referral code into a crypto site address.
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Technically:
Vivaldi attempts to be an all-in-one program that includes RSS and email client and is designed as a highly customizable productivity browser. The ad-blocker is serviceable, but a lot of users boost it by adding extensions like uBlock Origin Lite or similar.Brave has a more developed ad-blocker. They include crypto tools, as Brave provides a program to earn crypto tokens by viewing ads supplied by Brave. They also include AI. There is access to the TOR network but is not as secure as the actual TOR browser. More privacy features, especially without modifications to either browser.
Philosophically:
Vivaldi does not include crypto or AI and the owner does not seem the least bit interested in doing so. There is some minor data collection to track browser (and likely feature) usage, but attempts to anonymize it. They do include some Google features initially but they can be turned off. There is some closed source UI code but it is somewhat auditable.Brave is open source but is very interested in crypto and AI. The owner has some... questionable views to some and the browser has a few controversies in the past: leaks in the TOR network, grabbing donation monies from crypto donations, and inserting their own referral code into a crypto site address.
@cynical13 @annewalk This is an overall good overview of Vivaldi, but your point regarding data collection is not at all accurate.
Vivaldi _does not_ track in any way whatsoever your browser usage or the features you use. What they do instead, however, is create a unique ID to count you as a user.
This page goes into detail as to what that unique ID is used for (and their stalled attempt to get rid of it): https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/how-we-count-our-users/
Not mentioned in that page, is that they truncate your IP when performing a counting request with the unique ID; though this is mentioned in the second paragraph of the browser privacy policy: https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/
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@cynical13 @annewalk This is an overall good overview of Vivaldi, but your point regarding data collection is not at all accurate.
Vivaldi _does not_ track in any way whatsoever your browser usage or the features you use. What they do instead, however, is create a unique ID to count you as a user.
This page goes into detail as to what that unique ID is used for (and their stalled attempt to get rid of it): https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/how-we-count-our-users/
Not mentioned in that page, is that they truncate your IP when performing a counting request with the unique ID; though this is mentioned in the second paragraph of the browser privacy policy: https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/