Wow, I first saw this issue being managed in uBlock's thread, but I now understand this is pretty serious. Seems like it's designed to interfere with adblockers, Google is quite sneaky. Perhaps companies like Brave and Vivaldi should switch to another engine?
Marketing gets so "believable," but leave it to someone who takes what passes for "privacy" seriously nowadays to put a tiny damper on Vivaldi's la-di-dah. And yes, I've used Vivaldi on multiple occasions, trying to configure it to my liking drives me NUTS. Spoiler: png of x post re: Vivaldi
Can you explain a bit more plat? You don't believe that Vivaldi is good for privacy? To be fair, I believe that not even uBlock Origin can block all of the tracking. I often see ads on Instagram related to websites I just visited, so they must have found a way to track me, probably via browser fingerprinting. So blocking trackers is not enough.
Mmmm, no Rasheed, no can do as I don't run Vivaldi at the moment. I was quoting someone who does this stuff for a living and he pointed out a setting that is apparently injurious to privacy but is enabled by default on Vivaldi. That's all.
OK I see, he simply pointed out that Vivaldi's adblocker isn't enabled by default. Well, if Brave and Vivaldi are really so concerned about privacy, perhaps they should have chose Mozilla's Gecko engine instead of Chromium? Even DuckDuckGo chose to use WebView2.
Brave started with Gecko https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/ You can try searching for more info here https://nitter.net/Dmaster304/status/1446186532856123394#m
OK I see, so in the end they decided to switch to Chromium. Makes you wonder if it's simply easier to develop certain features on this framework instead of Mozilla's Gecko. But Firefox has got about the same privacy features, so this isn't likely.
Here is an interesting review about Vivaldi when it comes to privacy, I thought it was interesting: https://popzazzle.blogspot.com/2021/10/vivaldi-browser-privacy-review.html
Yeah, thanks Rasheed. It was interesting and well-written. Gave up thinking certain browsers were more "privacy" friendly long ago. In this context, what is the meaning of "privacy" anyway? Renaming certain functions to disguise their true purpose? Edit: now it's a 180 from user "privacy." Browsers vant to be alone with their info-gathering.
Thank you for sharing this article with us all. I want to give this browser another go. It just has so many settings to go through its mind numbing at times when I have a bunch of other things to tend do.
I'm guessing that Vivaldi, Firefox and Brave are probably best for privacy. But Mozilla makes $500 million a year because of their deal with Google, and Brave is a bit shady because of the integration with bitcoin and the Brave Ads system. Similar to Ghostery which was owned by an advertising company. Opera is also shady because they got bought by some Chinese company, but now they try to portray themselves as Norwegian again, I'm not buying it LOL. Keep in mind, that you don't have to use all of the settings, and it also has a search function. They will hopefully soon add a feature that allows to export settings, this way you can simply import them when reinstalling or when you make a new profile. And of course, I would then also be able to send you my settings file. Regarding privacy, you might want to disable all Google Services, unless you are not worried about that.
Here is an article about what this Google Privacy Sandbox (Google Topics) is all about, see link. In principle, it's not a bad idea, but only if they would get rid of the tracking part. How it's currently implemented it seems like companies would still get access to your browser history. I don't understand this sick obsession with tracking people on the web. What's wrong with serving ads that are related to people's interest, without having to track them? Also, I have sometimes disabled my adblocker on certain websites to support them, and what do they serve me? The same obnoxious, animated and distracting ads from 10 years ago, I don't know what's wrong with these people. If they don't fix this part, people will never stop using adblockers. https://restoreprivacy.com/google-rolls-out-privacy-sandbox-new-initiative-to-deliver-ads-on-chrome/
I will try to install and check it out again today. If you have any recommendations on settings, I am all hears. Import export of settings sounds great!
