Still based on Chrome, hard pass.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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It's really funny that the bold stance in tech now is essentially, "hey, we won't fuck with our product."
Vivaldi putting up a W by pledging to simply not do anything. It's that easy.
In a lot of cases I find that the more recent tech comes out, the more I don't want it. It's kinda nice when something that works, just keeps working and isn't trying to integrate everything new for no reason.
I’ve been struggling with this shift too. Tech used to game changing ideas for people, now it’s sole purpose is a vehicle for corporate profits. Tech used to be an exciting Wild West of crazy new ideas and new ways to be creative or play or communicate and share with friends or do less work. Now consumer focused tech is just minor evolutions of current tech launched with billion dollar marketing campaigns, corporate traps to lock you into app addictions or various subscriptions to see stock price increase 0.1%. And I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.
It doesn't help anything, but I've started finding the remaining or recreated web 1.0 corners of the internet. Like creating a gopher hole and joining a pubnix server. Something about being nice to not have the modern internet always trying to track me or sell me something. Dunno.
I'd like to agree but they are proprietary and still based on Chromium.
Still Chromium based. Pass. Librewolf
This is great, but my immediate concern is what's going to happen to ad blocking.
I wish Vivaldi wasn't Chrome, I wish they didn't sell Opera to a Chinese predatory loan company, but I find this browser to be the best by far. It has a lot of privacy functions built in, so no third party extensions needed. And remember, with almost everything that is free, you and your data is the product. So less companies hoarding in tour data is a plus. Next to that it's so user friendly. Mouse gestures, tab grouping, built in Proton VPN option, and so much more. Really a browser made to personalize and for ergonomics.
Does anybody have any recommendations for a non chrome based browser that has the compatibility to play things like MKV files? That’s essentially the only thing I keep my Thorium install around for. I use an app that I push an MKV to and then add subtitles in order to study Japanese.
Tell me more about your use case. I'm confused about what the app does beyond what VLC does out of the box.
I might give them the benefit of the doubt and try them again ('t has been years since)
while i don't use them as my main browser it feels vivaldi is one of the few ones who at least tries something new. who isn't just trying to emulate chrome with a few quality of life ones. i remember them introducing tiled tabs, stacked tabs, the tab bar on the sides or the bottom, way before i've seen any other browser do that? might not have been the first with all of those but at least firefox, chrome and edge didn't have that as an option back then
Tab management on Vivaldi is second to none. I pray every day that they swap to a Firefox backend one day, would be the best browser by a mile
What makes firefox's backend better? I've been considering switching from it lately.
Chromium based ones are at the mercy of Google. Firefox, however, is independent in that sense.
When google decides to drop support for manifest V2 (which is the one unlock origin uses), every chromium browser drops support for it. Unless they make a fork of chromium and add manifest V2 back in. Which means extra effort every time they want to update with upstream, since there probably will be merge conflicts.
Firefox can just not drop support for it, literally 0 effort.
It's not chrome
Basically this.
Any browser that leverages Google's Chromium project is enabling Google to continue to drive the web. Alternative browsers, first and foremost, must not be built using Chromium.
While this might seem like a win, I am not sure if I want an AI free browser. This might be an unpopular take, but there are a lot of applications where AI is actually useful. And I'm unsure if hand waving it entirely away is an actually good thing. And if they ever include some minor AI thing, people will call this lbacktracking. Maybe not a good idea?
The thing about coming up with a new invention that's useful is, you don't have to keep convincing everyone that it's useful. There are things that it's good for and they are already being used for that. What we are seeing now is an attempt to force it into every nook and cranny to justify the massive wealth bubble that they have created out of it to prop up the economy so they don't lose money. Eventually they will have all their money in the right place and they will let the economy crash and let the common man take 100% of the blow.
I agree. I don't think we have to push people into using some truly revolutionary tech. Then it would not be revolutionary.
The thing that frustrates me most about AI is that the companies that use AI in their software have ZERO creativity. A lot of applications and operating systems could have had AI in a lot of very narrow usecases. Everything from suggesting which command you should complete in the terminal, to where you should put your file for good organization.
I do know that AI is becoming synonymous with LLMs, and ML would be better for many usecases. The difference is that using LLMs is super easy for it, even if not as good.
Instead, we have this ridiculous thing in which we're supposed to remove the human part. That goes for art, music, and writing text. I think it's quite disrespectful to send messages to family, friends and colleagues that are written by AI, with few exceptions.
ardi60, interesting to see Vivaldi's pledge against AI in the browser. As developers, we're often looking for efficiency gains, and AI tools (like code completion or even intelligent debugging) are becoming pretty standard. Do you think this 'no AI' stance might hinder their ability to attract developers or power users who value those kinds of integrated features? I'm curious about the long-term vision there and if it's more about data privacy than outright feature avoidance. We've been looking at how to balance user privacy with helpful AI enhancements in our own developer tools — found some good insights here on the trade-offs.
Vivaldi, Zen and Librewolf are a trio of technophobic browsers, nithing new.
stick to chrome then.
Firefox works just fine for me
