Vivaldi’s main revenue stream is affiliate links, and I respect that.

However Vivaldi doesn’t just add affiliate links as bookmarks, Vivaldi also includes a “Direct Match” feature which adds affiliate links automatically when you search for a website.

Vivaldi also has an “Allow ads from our partners” ad blocker list turned on by default, which disables the ad blocker on sites that have paid them to do that.

The former is a tactic that Brave browser used to use, and the latter is one that Adblock Plus has used for years.

However, the problem with these features is that it is not disclosed to the user that they are enabled by default, and they are opt-out, not opt-in.

It would be more transparent if these features were disabled by default, then after visiting your first few websites, Vivaldi shows a pop-up like this:

Would you like to support Vivaldi for free?

If so, turning on Direct Match and allowing ads from our partners (which are all unintrusive) helps support us at no cost to you.

[ ] Enable Direct Match

[ ] Allow ads from our partners

[Got it]

    • Zerush@lemmy.ml
      8·
      3 months ago

      Propietary because part of it’s unique UI which can’t be used legally by Chrome or EDGE, but by the user to mod it, not OpenSource but source public available. For feature rich Gecko browsers it is way easier to be OpenSource, because there isn’t any big (US) corporations which use these browsers, also for simple Chromium forks whithout much features which are interesting for GOOGLE or M$. I understand that opt in to dirct match, partner ads and search engine are preferable, but at least it’s way more ethical to create incomming for the Vivaldi infrastructure (Mastodon, usermail, userblog, sync server, etc…) than logging and selling user data.

      https://github.com/ric2b/Vivaldi-browser