Chromium but with extra steps. Why did vivaldi choose chromium.
To be fair there’s not much choice. It’s either chromium or firefox’s engine, but if i remember correctly, back then firefox implemented some weird things that got a lot of backlash from the community (extension change, etc). Another option is to build a new web engine from the ground up, but it’s not worth it.
Because Blink is the best engine. Chromium, same as any other engine, is FOSS, therefore everyone, if want, can gutt out the Google crap it has by default, what the Vivaldi devs do very well in every update, leaving some Google APIs as options in the settings. If you desactivate eg the one of the Chrome Store, Vivaldi can’t download extensions from there, because it isn’t seen not longer as a Chromium. Vivaldi isn’t a simple chromium fork, pasting just the own logo, there is a lot of work behind every new release.
To be fair it is just a Chromium backend with their custom frontend. And the value Vivaldi brings is in that frontend hence it’s being proprietary.
Jón von Tetzchner mentioned they been talking internally about making it open source, but it’s very unlikely.
Well, part of the script of the UI is proprietary, but it’s 100% auditable and modificable by the user. The only point is that you can’t use the script for other projects or browsers. It’s not the same as in Chrome, Edge, Opera, there is nothing auditable in the script, apart from the Chromium script itself. Making the UI script in Vivaldi OpenSource, the first thing ocurres is that Chrome and Edge use it, killing all the other Chromiums, Vivaldi first. That isn’t the same in the Gecko engine, there isn’t any Big Brother using this engine. The engine isn’t the real problem, most use Blink, because it’s the best for several reasons, the problem is that the worst companies use it too and uniques developements and features which other company made, if it is released as OpenSource is a suicid for a small company, in a oversaturated and harsh Browser market (~100 browsers and forks), where the reason and sense of OpenSource is debatable. It is better to focus on other factors that are more important, business ethics with respect to the user, excellent support and a good community, the secondary services it offers, that it does not depend on external investors who can dictate the rules and that it does not create income from profiling the user to sell the data to others. Vivaldi complies with all this even in a political way, not being a company with a boss and his employees, but a cooperative, owned by its employees.
Sadly if google wants to screw ALL of them at once they can just change the licence. Of course they can keep the current and the previous versions. But then no security updates no feature updates. Didnt you ever thought about WHY did google open source it? To create a monopoly of chromium. That they controll when to screw over the “Chromium with extra steps” browsers. And if i am honest the company behind it doesnt have a good reputation, and never made anything else really FOSS, i call chromium freemium as it is foss for now but it can self destruct on a click on a button to screw all third party browsers at once. Use firefox is my all day recommendation. If you dont like firefox use librewolf. Its a REAL alternative with REAL open source software, there isnt a megacorp behind firefox rather a non-profit.
He can’t change the license, precisely most of the Browsers are chromium, even those from the biggest companies. If Google make Chromium proprietary closed soft, Sundar Pichai will find his head on a stake the next day. He don’t need it either, since he don’t have to pay much attention to Chromium, irrelevant to Google’s business. These are his dozens of services that he offer (Gmail, Gdrive, Maps, Google Earth, Workspace, YouTube, googleanalytics,…etc.), this is where he can gain power over others, this is exactly what he want to implement now with MEI DRM for web pages and their services, forcing all browsers to incorporate his Token, yes or yes, in order to access this sites and services, irrelevant if you use Chromium, Gecko, WebKit or anything else, with this is Google who decide which browser is worth to recive this token.
