Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and founder of Vivaldi Technologies, refuses to integrate AI features in its browser and wants human engineers, not AI, to write its code.
If we ignore privacy and open-source considerations for a moment, Vivaldi has been one of my favorite browsers. They embraced vertical tabs, they offer customizability instead of forcing everyone into the same mold, and it doesn’t have all the anti-features (AI specifically) that some other browsers have.
I’m gonna give them a high five while continuing to use LibreWolf/IronFox.
I think AI should be a choice, not something every browser has to push on its users. Everyone has their own preferences.
So just the way Firefox does it? Only local models, all configurable?
Perhaps
The recent controversy on House House makes me (only a little) worried that for the next century, most people will be hardline 100% never-AI, instead of just “Stop shoving it everywhere, stop copying artwork”. As people like Bernie have said, it’s an automation technology that can have nice effects should those use cases receive careful consideration. We just don’t often get that consideration.
I will never understand why the push to AI was so freaking AGGRESSIVE. Like, take it, shove it down your throat, avoidance of AI is BANNED, type of bullshit. It should speak for itself when it works.
Imagine that tomorrow Tetschner goes crazy and starts dating a Chinese spy. Or joins the Trumpist sect…
Im never leaving zen, its been stable for a while now, was so ass when I started using it, now I never lose anything, forgot it used to be rough
Does the vimium plugin work on zen yet? That was the only pain point that was holding me back from switching last time I tried it.
I will always advocate ai for shit like this, just make it work yourself, debug it by using it. Make it show you it’s work, sometimes it’s a simple edit, have it avoid restructuring and use minimal code. Can easily be done for free. Ik it’s obviously preferred to have official support but for things like plugins, I just get to use them now instead of waiting for my issue to never be resolved.
Eh, until there is actual support I’ll just use a browser that supports what I need. Zen is nice, but the difference isn’t great enough for me to want to spend a whole bunch of time making things work.
Tetzchner says the company asked its users whether they wanted added AI features, and the response was “no.”
Revolutionary technique, asking if anyone wants a feature before you go all-in on it.
- Microsoft enters the chat
“Customers don’t want it” is surprisingly difficult to understand for a lot of companies nowadays. Vivaldi must be run by some sort of language genius.
It’s a private compnay, they don’t have to follow shareholders so it explains it
Methinks shareholders should somehow be concerned what end users want.
Shareholders want the line to go up, currently AI is a thing that makes that happen, long-term effects be damned.
you don’t want to be the one that missed out by not jumping on the train.
Somehow and for now
They are only concerned about money
Which is somehow related.
Yeah but they are usually not that smart, they only think in short term than long term
We have very prominent cases where this is true. But is it also true in general? Idk
Basically any public company right now?
onlythinkaboutnextquarter then thinkaboutnextquarter
step 3) profit?Not as related as they should be. Stock prices are based on belief, not on reality.
It’s really dumb but it holds true. I work for a company that profits tens of millions per year, and we’re owned by one guy. I’ve worked at places that are owned by hedge funds or giant corporations like GE and you can just tell the difference. Here I’ve been told that if the shop needs something, it’s basically a blank check. The owner gave everyone in the company a $3 raise last year, and we get a 10% bonus of your salary annually as a profit sharing initiative. Annual raises are good, wages are excellent, benefits are some of the best in the country and they do everything they can to keep them as a low cost. We just happen to manufacture things that nobody else in the country does.
Compared to other other more typical companies it’s really night and day. I used to get a 3% annual raise and a “I can’t get you more even though I want to”. And some of the shittiest health insurance imaginable. My coworker broke his foot and they wouldn’t wait on him until he saw a specialist like wtf he literally just needed a cast
“wants”
it’s chromium, it uses ai. i think this guy wants to do marketing
also, yall stop saying firefox sucks because all web browsers capable of the bloated standards are de facto corporate controlled
For anyone saying it’s Chromium based as a reason to not use it: how is Mozilla any better at this point? Can you point to anything notable and positive that Mozilla has done in the past idk 10 years or so? They won’t even include adblocking with their browser our of fear they lose Google’s support.
Maintaining a viable cross platform 3rd party browser with proper extensions support including Ublock and strict tracking controls?
None of that is unique to Firefox though. Vivaldi has all those features too and adblock don’t even require an extension its just built in, Mozilla doesn’t even include adblocking by default.
An additional engine is important because otherwise the implementation becomes the standard instead of the engine following the standard. That is a risk to further competition. We saw that when IE won too hard over Netscape.
It’s not “proper extensions support” if they don’t work half the time, and start working only after the website is loaded. Breaks gestures support completely, for instance.
Firefox is great, don’t get me wrong, but there’s A LOT wrong with its extensions system.
Ad-blocker extensions aren’t crippled, browsers are fully open source including cloud services instead of Google’s open core model and Mozilla has a better track record on this sort of stuff. Also technically Firefox does have built-in ad blocking capabilities now but for some reason there isn’t a UI for it yet.
I’d consider not making adblocking built in part of the browser to be crippling the browser, who wants that? But if Mozilla did include it they’d lose millions in funding from guess who.
If you go to
about:configand enableprivacy.trackingprotection.content.protection.enabled, then you can add the blocklists toprivacy.trackingprotection.content.protection.test_list_urlsand use the built-in adblocker. I think Waterfox also builts a UI on top of this.Interesting feature but you lost 90% of users at “if you go to about:config”, Meanwhile since 2020 when you first launch vivalidi they just ask if you want to enable it
Who values their users more, the advertising company that has been shoveling in unwanted features to their browser for over a decade while leaving the most wanted one behind “about:config” or a 3rd party extension, or the one who’s browser actually has features people actually asked for?
Waterfox is great, hopefully they can continue without google’s support whenever google decided to pull the plug on firefox now that they no longer need it as anti-trust insurance.
Who values their users more, the advertising company that has been shoveling in unwanted features to their browser for over a decade while leaving the most wanted one behind “about:config” or a 3rd party extension, or the one who’s browser actually has features people actually asked for?
More like the company that values their users enough to make both the browser core and its cloud integrations open source versus a company that slapped a proprietary reskin that can’t be forked on top of Chromium.
Waterfox is great, hopefully they can continue without google’s support whenever google decided to pull the plug on firefox now that they no longer need it as anti-trust insurance.
I hope Vivaldi can survive when Google cripples Chromium like they’re doing with AOSP since its browser engine is literally made by them
The UI being closed is a valid criticism for sure. I’ve read their reasoning for it and having seen how some corps abuse open source I find it a fair move, much more so then I consider not including an Adblock option out of the box, or whatever pocket was and shoveling in AI no one asked for. Certainly other people will have different priorities and I can respect that too.
I’ve read their reasoning for it and having seen how some corps abuse open source I find it a fair move
But they “abused” open source software themselves, so I’m going to call bullshit on that
much more so then I consider not including an Adblock option out of the box, or whatever pocket was and shoveling in AI no one asked for
Which the forks removed because unlike Vivaldi Firefox is open source
Build Vivaldi on top of Firefox rather than Chrome, and I’m in.
Just use Firefox. It doesn’t have any AI built into it as far as I’m aware.
Unfortunately, vanilla Firefox does have AI built-in, as well as a lot of other garbage. Librewolf is a fork that strips out all that junk, and it bundles in some cool security features as well.
But apparently Vivaldi is good, too.
Its got a whole panel that pops open when you click the button in upper left corner under the tabs.
You can turn all the AI stuff off pretty easily, but yeah.
Yeah I mostly forget that panel even exists.
Then you may not be aware that it is has integrated AI features.
based af. I’m installing Vivaldi right now, holy shit.
It’s Chromium based.
I’m uninstalling it right now!
I’m not switching to Vivaldi, but it is refreshing to see someone say “I didn’t put X in the product because people don’t want X in the product.”
I’d use Vivaldi if it wasn’t chrorium and closed source, sadly it’s such a turn off
The UI layer is the only part that’s closed source. Vivaldi’s UI is also one of the main reasons people use it.
Yeah but de facto i still cannot see what they put in there
I, too, would use Vivaldi if it wasn’t Vivaldi.
Isn’t Vivaldi largely open source?
the devs like to pretend that it is and say how only a small part of it is proprietary, but it’s a deceptive PR stunt because they’re counting the whole chromium source into that statistic. if we don’t consider the chromium source they didn’t write, their own vivaldi code is largely proprietary.
regardless, a program consisting of 99.9% free code and 0.1% proprietary code is proprietary as a whole - you can’t audit, modify or redistribute copies of it as long as any non-free code is present.
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AI is just a more destructive and environmentally catastrophic NFT.
What do they have to do with each other?
In a mechanical sense not a whole lot, but in both the reason why they are being focused on and what it does to the cost of computer parts they are quite similar. NFTs, Metaverse, and AI have all gotten the focus they have because the tech industry has been chasing the high of the internet and later smart phone booms, they all want the next big thing but they are all ignorant to fact that the only reason said booms worked was because of the broad utility which AI and NFTs have little of.
NFT tried to be an alternative to currency, But it almost endangered the economy and general affordability guarantees the same way AI used up water sources and federally protected forests
To be clear NFTs tried to be a replacement to traditional proof of asset ownership like paper deeds and such. Then a bunch of people used that to create contracts for ownership of links to assets and sold that to speculative investors, aka morons, and thus another actually neat technology with a good niche dies.
Similar to the blockchain being an amazing technology that could instantly verify transactions with complete accuracy; and instead got used for alternative currencies.
Cryptocurrencies (blockchain-backed contract ownership of assigned mathematical conclusions) tried to be currency, NFTs in popular culture tried to be art (as in how art is actually bought and sold in the real world for money laundering.)
AI (GAN including LLMs), like blockchain and NFTs, has its extremely specific narrow use case for society - one that is currently overblown and is being used incorrectly in all parts of society, and wasting the resources used and tarnishing the technology at the same time.
Crypto is working out great for criminals and NK.
Vivaldis not bad. Good for work where you need different profiles; not crazy resource intensive
I’m on librewolf just now having used vivaldi for about three years as my daily. Great browser, I just fancied swapping the chromium problems for gecko problems for a while :D
And for people like me with a problem closing tabs, the memory management is excellent, killing off anything that hasn’t been used in a while.
You can do that in Firefox too tbf
So what you’re saying is there are two good alternatives out there now?!
No, there is only Firefox.
Firefox gang ✊🏼
Yeah, it’s a good Chromium browser. I used it for a few years before switching to Firefox browsers. If you have to use Chromium, I’d recommend it. If you can though Firefox has been far more enjoyable (I’m using Zen currently).
It’s my secondary browser. Pretty much just for HDR on YouTube. Firefox still can’t do it.
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Would be a really really expected deciding factor for a secondary browser though.
Lmao
Idk about not resource intensive but it does browser things happily.
It’s good for work when a woork-related website won’t accept a Gecko-based browser.
