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1. Share with your friends. Help us grow.
2. Utilize the included search partners, with which we have deals. Startpage, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia and Yahoo. We do not have deals with Microsoft and Google, unlike our competitors.
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We are fighting with Big Tech and they want us gone. You can make a difference.
@jon as a happy Vivaldi and DuckDuckGo user, an honest question: Don't all those search engines also use just Bing or Google and pay them in return? Does a truly big-tech independent search engine actually exist?
@flooper , there are various attempts going on. The latest is this one:
I think it is important to get alternatives for sure. Big tech needs competition. I also think it is important to support browsers and search engines other than the Big tech ones, even though there may be some reliance on Big tech even for them.
Building another rendering engine is too much work. We did that at Opera and it was the best engine around, but sadly Opera killed it after I left. There is a lot of complexities there that most would not understand.
There is not a lot of alternative engines out there and I do not think it would be worth the effort to try to be compatible with another engine. We modify Chromium. It is a lot of work to maintain that. Doing that with more than one engine is just not feasible and would not bring us anything.
If we treated the rendering engine as a black box, we might have been able to do more, but that is not what we do.
@jon I’m following the Servo.org project from the side, so I’m well aware of how much hard work this is.
Still, thank you very much for your thoughtful answer.
At the moment, I’m still on Firefox, with a heavy use of Containers. Before that (some 3 years ago), I came from Chrome with multiple profiles. Much more difficult setup.
Does Vivaldi has something similar (upcoming) for session isolation?
I think one has to realize that when building a browser from scratch is too much work for Apple, Google and Microsoft, it is too much work for most everyone.
At Opera we had a unique team that had worked on the codebase for up to 20 years. We knew what we were doing. I think Opera could have continued to work on Presto and should have, but starting from scratch is another thing.
A lot of it is related to how things work on the Web. It is not enough to implement the standards. You also need to be compatible with others. Even if you are, you may still be blocked from accessing services. We are being blocked even today, which is why we have to ID as Chrome and not Vivaldi.
With regards to containers, we do not have that today. On the other hand, you may well find out that the other features we have, such as Workspaces and tab stacks, make up for that. It is also very easy to have multiple instances of Vivaldi running. Standalone installs are a powerful tool.
@jon I've always been a fan of Opera back in the Presto days, but even I acknowledge that as great as it would be to see the engine getting licensed and brought back up to modern standards, even that much is still quite the undertaking
@elfi , indeed. We had a team of 100 working on Presto when I left Opera. My estimate at the time was that we would need to add 10% to the team each year to stay competitive as the requirements kept expanding. This was with a team that knew the code well, had written it and were highly skilled. That code has not been maintained now for more than 12 years.
Anyone that works with programming knows it is not just a question of adding a lot of people to the team. Trying to do 10 years of work in one year with 10 times more people is not feasible. The effectiveness goes down as the team grows as more time is spent on other things than coding and nobody understands the whole code anymore.
A lot of time is also needed to harness the code and that is done over time.