Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

vivaldi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#31

Post by rhabarba »

dao- wrote: post #30
hawski wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation the Mozilla Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. It's of course not to say that the Mozilla Corporation is an evil profit seeker, but merely a perspective. I for one think that modern web standards are used by most web site authors not in users interests. Therefore implementing those standards in good faith not necessarily mean imp…

> Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation the Mozilla Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. It's of course not to say that the Mozilla Corporation is an evil profit seeker, but merely a perspective. "wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation" is the more important part here, because the Foundation is nonprofit and eventually has authority over the corporation, so…

From the Wikipedia:

> Net income: US$103.8 million (2016)

I wonder how rough things must be.

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#33

Post by GyYZTfWBfQw »

onyva wrote: post #7

Stick with Mozilla Firefox. Don’t understand why people still believe a for-profit Corp will prioritize users rights. ... not to mention Brendan Eich’s divisive and controversial behavior befor he was forced out of Mozilla.

Don't understand why a huge ideological conglomerate will prioritize users rights. The same conglomerate that lobby for standards that are massively detrimental to users, collect all sorts of user information etc.

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#34

Post by nmbr213 »

onyva wrote: post #7

Stick with Mozilla Firefox. Don’t understand why people still believe a for-profit Corp will prioritize users rights. ... not to mention Brendan Eich’s divisive and controversial behavior befor he was forced out of Mozilla.

> Mozilla Firefox

The browser that's has Google Analytics integrated, comes with pre-installed third-party tracking app, and that reports home every UI interaction you have? No, thanks, I'll stick with Iridium.

[1] https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox.html

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#35

Post by MaxBarraclough »

drchaos wrote: post #26
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More to the point, it's closed-source.

Not open source per OSI criteria, however they claim the source is available and can be inspected: https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/

Interesting.

> This means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit.

Acid test: can I build it myself and expect to see identical binaries to what they ship?

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#36

Post by gaellelo »

novaRom wrote: post #3

From their privacy policy: "When you install Vivaldi browser, each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message. We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the…

Hey, here's Gaëlle Medeiros-Logeay, Data Protection Officer at Vivaldi.

The data we collect is not personally identifiable, and we try to keep it as minimal as possible. :)

We're not in the business of collecting data, and we do not sell them to advertisers like others do. The collected data helps us to understand where most of our users come from.

Our stats show us which country our users are located in and nothing more. We don't do data profiling. We just look at trends.

We don't see any browsing history, it's all stored locally so that only you can see your own browsing history. If you use Sync, then the data is encrypted.

If you want to read more about our privacy, this article wrote about us at length on this topic: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/30/vivaldi-browser-privacy/

Hope this clarifies things for you. :)

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#37

Post by rjvbk »

onyva wrote: post #7

Stick with Mozilla Firefox. Don’t understand why people still believe a for-profit Corp will prioritize users rights. ... not to mention Brendan Eich’s divisive and controversial behavior befor he was forced out of Mozilla.

You're talking about the same Firefox that displays ads on my home page by default, sends analytics to them by default, and is owned by a foundation that is owned by a for-profit company?

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#38

Post by dao- »

rhabarba wrote: post #31
dao- wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation the Mozilla Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. It's of course not to say that the Mozilla Corporation is an evil profit seeker, but merely a perspective. "wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation" is the more important part here, because the Foundation is nonprofit and eventually has authority over the corporation, so…

From the Wikipedia: > Net income: US$103.8 million (2016) I wonder how rough things must be.

Pretty rough, but that's not a too unrealistic scenario given that Google is a pretty aggressive competitor in the browser market and there are hardly any other search engines that would be good enough to be the default in a mainstream browser. (Mozilla tried with Yahoo but they couldn't deliver the quality users have come to expect.)

Have you checked Mozilla's expenses too? It has around 1200 employees, I think, and a few offices around the world, data center costs etc.. If you want to be able to independently keep that going for a few years, you need a big war chest.

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#39

Post by ailideex »

So on their landing page - they say "We are cookie-free" - but they put these values in localstorage:

    h_user: 9019.....
    user: {"isLogged":false,"error":false,"userSetting":{"searchRegionKey":"GB","searchMode":0,"safeSearch":1,"enableSuggest":true,"targetBlank":true,"showTrends":1,"showSmartNews":true,"showSmartVideos":true,"showSmartSocial":true,"selectTheme":0,"showFavicon":true,"continentKey":"WESTERNEUROPE","searchLanguageKey":"en","interfaceLanguageKey":"en_gb"},"version":28,"fieldsValidity":{}}
So ... kinda bullshit.

Re: Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a privacy-focused search engine based in Europe

#40

Post by Liquid_Fire »

rhabarba wrote: post #21
onyva wrote: post #7

Stick with Mozilla Firefox. Don’t understand why people still believe a for-profit Corp will prioritize users rights. ... not to mention Brendan Eich’s divisive and controversial behavior befor he was forced out of Mozilla.

Have you noticed that Mozilla Firefox has started to become a tracking device? https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo... German-specific: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-de/2017/10/06/ein-neues-cliqz... Oh, yes, they were deeply sorry about it. I'm sure that Google would be as well.

What does the Mr Robot extension have to do with tracking?
Post reply on HN