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Vivaldi's Leader Has a Bold Pledge: No AI in Your Web Browser European (www.pcmag.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
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[โ€“] 14 points 4 months ago (1 child)

I settled on Vivaldi as my daily driver for the features it gives me (and mostly getting out of the way), so this is perfect news for me

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    • [โ€“] 11 points 4 months ago

    A pledge not to enshittify isn't particularly bold.

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    [โ€“] 6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    "Bold"? They just said they won't implement a feature their target audience doesn't want. What's next? "Walmart makes a bold claim: no flamethrowers in the veggie aisle"

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  • [โ€“] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Expect that the Majority likes AI, also in Browsers.

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    • 44 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [โ€“] 135 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [โ€“] 22 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [โ€“] 20 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Iโ€™ve been struggling with this shift too. Tech used to game changing ideas for people, now itโ€™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 donโ€™t see any light at the end of the tunnel.

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  • [โ€“] 9 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [โ€“] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I too pledge not to put AI in your life!

    I mean, I'm not a programmer, and I have no products, but.....I needed a win in my life, and if I get a W by pledging not to do things I wasn't going to do anyways? I'll take it!

    I also pledge not to eat unhealthy today.

    ..........I might break that one actually. We'll see.

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  • [โ€“] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Mozilla should really take note. For all that talk about ethics - more than a whole manifesto worth - they really would rather reject the easy W.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I think Mozilla sees there is a bigger userbase interested in AI features than the userbase distancing themselves from it. and they need to be doing something to grow the market share because they are disappearing.

    I don't know whether it's a good path for them. what I know is that thanks to volunteers like librewolf, I can continue using a browser on my terms.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 4 months ago*

    I agree that that's what Mozilla seems to be doing, but that doesn't seem like a smart idea at all. Mozilla has their niche (that they're alienating), while AI enthusiasts already have browsers that did the AI thing earlier than Mozilla, and probably much better.

    But don't take my word for it alone:

    Maybe look back at that 30 year history and see what they were doing when they had positive DAU and do that again?

    I'll give them a hint because I was around then: It wasn't chasing the latest fads.

    It was doing what they're good at, being deeply abnormal, and helping folk make what they really wanted.

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    • [โ€“] 35 points 4 months ago

    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.

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    [โ€“] 30 points 4 months ago

    Still based on Chrome, hard pass.

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    [โ€“] 16 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    This is great, but my immediate concern is what's going to happen to ad blocking.

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    [โ€“] 41 points 4 months ago

    Still Chromium based. Pass. Librewolf

    โค๏ธ 1
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    [โ€“] 9 points 4 months ago

    I'd like to agree but they are proprietary and still based on Chromium.

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    [โ€“] 13 points 4 months ago* (12 children)

    I might give them the benefit of the doubt and try them again ('t has been years since)

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  • [โ€“] 24 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    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

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  • [โ€“] 18 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    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

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  • [โ€“] 5 points 4 months ago

    That's why I still use them as my main. I can't close tabs, so between their workspaces with tiled tabs and tab memory management not keeping 200 processes open (I know!) it's been amazing for me. My only reservation is it being chromium.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    What makes firefox's backend better? I've been considering switching from it lately.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    On PC Iโ€™ve used them pretty much since the start and I have very little to complain about.

    On mobile (iOS) I tried a few times but itโ€™s unbearably slow.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 4 months ago

    I've also been on Vivaldi since right around the start. I'd just wish they would fix their address bar suggestions to actually work. It isn't great to start, and then decides to completely break every few months and do stuff like when I type "you" to go to youtube it insists on autofilling to a specific video I watched months ago. The only fix I've found is to nuke the profile and start over.

    I've switched to Zen on my computer a couple months ago exclusively because of that issue.

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    • [โ€“] 6 points 4 months ago

    Hmm. I might be interested in switching to Vivaldi.

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    [โ€“] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Does anybody have any recommendations for a non chrome based browser that has the compatibility to play things like MKV files? Thatโ€™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.

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  • [โ€“] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Tell me more about your use case. I'm confused about what the app does beyond what VLC does out of the box.

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    • [โ€“] 2 points 4 months ago

    I'm so gonna try vivaldi when I finally have some issue with librewolf or if

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    [+] -8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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?

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  • [โ€“] 13 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 4 months ago

    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.

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    • [+] -39 points 4 months ago (4 children)
    [deleted]
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