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.
also, yall stop saying firefox sucks because all web browsers capable of the bloated standards are de facto corporate controlled
I just vibe code my own browser, with blackjack and hookers.
AI is just a more destructive and environmentally catastrophic NFT.
What do they have to do with each other?
NFT tried to be an alternative to currency, But it almost endangered the economy and general affordability guarantees the same way AI used up water sources and federally protected forests
Tetzchner says the company asked its users whether they wanted added AI features, and the response was “no.”
Revolutionary technique, asking if anyone wants a feature before you go all-in on it.
Build Vivaldi on top of Firefox rather than Chrome, and I’m in.
Just use Firefox. It doesn’t have any AI built into it as far as I’m aware.
Its got a whole panel that pops open when you click the button in upper left corner under the tabs.
You can turn all the AI stuff off pretty easily, but yeah.
Yeah I mostly forget that panel even exists.
I Zen Browser and Vivaldi. Vivaldi is great.
This guy is my new hero.
This ai stuff is like the new clippy the paperclip, GTFO of my phone.
I don’t want features just rolled out without my consent.
Long term I will have to install custom roms and get bank cards from my bank again thanks to AI.
I hate the fact that it’s so hard to buy an android phone without it coming with a load of proprietary apps that I can’t remove. If I want their casino shit, their stupid health apps, whatever - I’ll download it myself. Being unable to uninstall it really pisses me off. I’m pretty sure it’s practically malware. And the AI shit is just as bad - phone I’m on now came with at least 3 different AI apps for whatever. I did actually manage to remove two, but they keep trying to reinstall, could be hiding behind my launcher. And I bought this phone 2 years ago, I can only imagine it’s even harder to get away from these days.
Maybe I’m out of touch, but I think most people just want an operating system and the opportunity to install what they want on it.
I mean, much of it meets all the criteria to be called malware, so it is “walking like a duck” and “quacking like a duck”.
All that bloat is typically cross-marketing agreements made with the makers of those apps to subsidize the phone’s cost without user consent. The part that I find weird is that there have been almost no marketing trials from major players testing the waters to see how much of a market there is for the same products that are not subsidized in this way, available at “full price”. Maybe they’re afraid that would draw too much attention to how atrocious the existing offerings are by comparison. It might put the privacy discussion more into the public discourse, which could be bad for their “business model”.
AI is much too energy consuming to be a default option.
adult person right here. true G.
I really hope Vivaldi stays good. It’s basically the only browser I’m considering usable. I’ll make do with something else in a pinch, but surfing the web without Vivaldi is like not having a hand.
I’m using it for stuff that doesn’t work without Chromium (like a translation tool that doesn’t break SPA forms) but yeah not being able to use my custom adblockers concerns me.
Same. If it weren’t a Chromium browser I’d explore it more, it seems to have a lot of neat options.
Waterfox is better, it’s open source, not based on chromium and has a split DNS resolution path through their own servers and cloudlfare. A few tweaks in about:config and it’s by far the best option out there.
And it’s also free of AI.
The repo has a CLAUDE.md brother
Sure it is. Does it have mouse gestures?
What are some of your about:config tweaks?
There are several, depending on your level of paranoia, you may want to only change a few or go deep into the rabbit hole. Basically when you install waterfox, you should first check the regular settings, for example, strict enhanced traffic protection in the privacy and security tab is a good start, there are more in other tabs that you can navigate quite easily and are pretty straightforward.
In about:config, one of the most important is geo.enabled, this one should definitely be set to false, it’s even recommended on the arch Linux wiki. You can also set both privacy.fingerprintingProtection and privacy.resistFingerprinting to true (the second one will, among other things, set your local clock static at UTC 0, so the payload you send out will always show UTC timezone, wherever you are). However, keep in mind that the second one will also break some websites that you’ll visit as well as slowing down your browsing experience a bit.
In the end it’s always a trade off between privacy and convenience, so you can explore and see the config that works best for your particular case.
Remind me in a year (2027-11-13): Vivaldi has gone bankrupt.
Ironically we don’t have bots here so you’re asking a human to just remember.
I’d use Vivaldi if it wasn’t chrorium and closed source, sadly it’s such a turn off
I, too, would use Vivaldi if it wasn’t Vivaldi.
The UI layer is the only part that’s closed source. Vivaldi’s UI is also one of the main reasons people use it.
Yeah but de facto i still cannot see wgat they put in there
deleted by creator
Firefox has locally run AI features you can turn off easily. I don’t see the harm. Occasionally I use the translation feature for foreign websites.
If you ask me, Firefox gets a lot of shit and it’s blown completely out of proportion. Are they without flaw? Of course not, but it’s not nearly as bad as people want you to believe.Instead I switched to Waterfox which is just Firefox with all of the bullshit excluded.
The problem isn’t what is in Firefox now, it’s what will be in Firefox in the future. It’s their clearly established predilection for mindless trend-chasing and willingness to ignore their users’ clearly stated wishes in order to pack the damn thing full of crap nobody wants anyway rather than actually utilize their comparatively meager resources towards actually developing the actual browser part of the browser. That’s a huge issue.
AI features should be opt in, not opt out. Every time it updates it also often turns those features back on (at least a couple times for me)
The AI features are why I switched to Waterfox, as they promised to not implement the Firefox’s AI-stuff. That promise has held, at least so far.
Good to know. I see they are available both on Linux and android, so all bases covered.
I turned it off once and it stayed off.
the problem with Firefox AI implementation was more of a communication issue.
Firefox keeps adding stuff like this to its browser and it keeps messing up a good thing. I don’t mind them adding experiments, but they keep trying to add stuff that places them as intermediaries in some kind of convenient “service” that is offered.
for whatever reason they just can’t stop from shoving all that stuff into their main product instead treating it as a side project
It’s a purity race to oblivion : people who know and care use Firefox. They switched away from the default and by that very action they are in the tiny minority who actually has a grasp at problems and dare try to do something about. They are vocal about it, put efforts into the process so they in general want “more” and “better” according to their own criteria. It doesn’t stop there though, once they have moved away for privacy or open source or sovereignty or whatever else, they want the other criteria and it won’t stop.
It is recursive though, people who care a lot about some criteria move away from Firefox, the now “mainstream” within that community, then use e.g. Waterfox or LibreWolf. You can see this in any community which moves away from the mainstream choice really. There is a vocal minority within the minority and they do have genuine reasons and concern.
Once you use LibreWolf I bet there are other forks, etc, etc.
For those people what Firefox is doing is actually very bad because it goes back to what they wanted to move away from.
I will add, that enshittification is a big part of the process. Money drives companies do things users do not like, and the only power we hold against that, is to walk away. If we do not use that power, things will only get worse, or end up in a monopoly situation, where you lose most of that power, and all of it, if it is something, you must use.
What often happens is, that the wave kind of starts as a small movement away, and when the enshittification goes too far (and competition has not been killed successfully yet), it gets bigger and bigger. And that wave brings money, which either starts or hastens the enshittification process of the product people moved to. And the cycle repeats.
“Customers don’t want it” is surprisingly difficult to understand for a lot of companies nowadays. Vivaldi must be run by some sort of language genius.
“wants”
it’s chromium, it uses ai. i think this guy wants to do marketing
It’s a private compnay, they don’t have to follow shareholders so it explains it
It’s really dumb but it holds true. I work for a company that profits tens of millions per year, and we’re owned by one guy. I’ve worked at places that are owned by hedge funds or giant corporations like GE and you can just tell the difference. Here I’ve been told that if the shop needs something, it’s basically a blank check. The owner gave everyone in the company a $3 raise last year, and we get a 10% bonus of your salary annually as a profit sharing initiative. Annual raises are good, wages are excellent, benefits are some of the best in the country and they do everything they can to keep them as a low cost. We just happen to manufacture things that nobody else in the country does.
Compared to other other more typical companies it’s really night and day. I used to get a 3% annual raise and a “I can’t get you more even though I want to”. And some of the shittiest health insurance imaginable. My coworker broke his foot and they wouldn’t wait on him until he saw a specialist like wtf he literally just needed a cast
Methinks shareholders should somehow be concerned what end users want.
Shareholders want the line to go up, currently AI is a thing that makes that happen, long-term effects be damned.
Somehow and for now
They are only concerned about money
Which is somehow related.
Not as related as they should be. Stock prices are based on belief, not on reality.
Yeah but they are usually not that smart, they only think in short term than long term
We have very prominent cases where this is true. But is it also true in general? Idk
onlythinkaboutnextquarter then thinkaboutnextquarter
step 3) profit?
