I am a little disappointed that Vivaldi did not do so well in this test. What do you think? Is there a way to improve Vivaldi in these areas? Is it necessary? Should privacy-conscious people use another browser?
The person doing these tests works for Brave and doesn’t disclose this on the main page. He keeps spamming social media with his results and therefore this comes up time and time again. The main problem is that he refuses to test browsers which have been configured, he always tests them ootb. For Vivaldi this means ad and tracking protection is disabled, even though the choice of setting this up is presented to the user in the very first setup steps (one‐click operation), without the need to visit settings …
I wouldn’t take the results serious. If you want a sliver/the chance of privacy, you have to use Tor browser anyway.
Of course this is bullshit. One single Browser does not win in basically every category except this is an advertisement for said browser.
@Dirk @accentgrave, many are confused about what is important to privacy. These are not technical details or statistics (OS, screen resolution, language, etc.) that are important for the proper functioning of a web page, but personal data
It is always a compromise, if I activate all the protections it has, many pages stop working correctly. Privacy depends more on the search engines used and the user’s common sense than on the browser(if other than Chrome/EDGE/Opera)
if I activate all the protections it has, many pages stop working correctly.
I use cookie whitelist AND a Javascript whitelist. I’m used to not “properly working” websites.
Important context, original test was created before they were invited to work at Brave and in part because of their creation of the test. And LibreWolf and Mullvad wins the tests, not Brave.
And testing out-of-the-box experience is valid use case as that is what most of the non-tech people you recommend the browser will run.
Also while it’s great that Vivaldi has ad and tracker protection added, it’s average at best. Installing uBlock Origin with default configuration is better than what Vivaldi offers.
The point is his allegiance should be disclosed front and center on the main page. Might as well declare it as Brave browser advertisement. You can’t be impartial, if you work for the company.
Full disclosure and transparency
(Updated June 2022)This website and the browser privacy tests are an independent project by me, Arthur Edelstein. I have developed this project on my own time and on my own initiative. Several months after first publishing the website, I became an employee of Brave, where I contribute to Brave’s browser privacy engineering efforts. I continue to run this website independently of my employer, however. There is no connection with Brave marketing efforts whatsoever.
I am committed to maintaining this website’s accuracy and impartiality. It is my goal not to promote any browser here, but rather to offer objective test results for all browsers that encourages a general improvement in privacy across the industry.
By keeping this project fully open source, I endeavor to provide the maximum possible transparency and verifiability of the tests and results. Anyone who wishes to check the results can clone the git repository and run the browser tests independently. Ideas for additional tests, or code (pull requests) for additional tests that provide further insight into browser privacy, will be gratefully accepted.
Searching for “Brave controversy” should bring up some of them. Basically over the years they’ve done various controversial things like enabling bitcoin mining by default, automatically including referrals in search or substituting their own ads. There was another much more recently, but I forget what that was. In the past, these controversies were followed by the CEO going on a marketing campaign and speaking to users on social media - the new users typically drowned out the controversy.
They’re not a massively evil company, but my general impression is that they’re very fickle and it would only take a relatively small sack of money for them to sell their users up the river.
Edit: I should also add that some of these things were added with little to no announcement. They were caught doing it the link referrals stuff, it wasn’t included in the update changelog.
They are shady in a lot of their activities, but I haven’t seen anything of substance that invalidates the privacy or security of the browser itself.
Every browser created on top of the Chromium open source base and/or by a for-profit organization cannot be seen as secure.
firefox, librewolf. use nothing but FOSS.
It depends on what you want from your browser. It’s not the best in privacy and it’s not the best in security. It’s also slower than most other browsers due to the all the UI stuff they add on top of Chromium.
You can harden it to some extent by installing uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. But every extension makes you more fingerprintable.
But Vivaldi shines in productivity especially combined with vimium. Being able to tailor every single action to your preference can save a lot of time.
I would suggest using a variety of browsers based on your activity. I use Vivaldi as my main work browser, but when I visit new sites I’m more likely to open them in a different more hardened browser.
