Vivaldi, the Firefox Replacement

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It’s been a couple of days since I’ve written anything. Part of that is because my day job highly makes me feel like I don’t want to do anything when I get out of work. The other part of it, is that I spent hours and hours refreshing and updating the look and feel of my site (it’s cooler now). Now that I’ve done that, I’d like to write about Vivaldi.

A little while ago I wrote about the on-going blunders of the Mozilla Foundation, and their head-long dive into AI, and the manipulation of hiding data hijacking within features that promise privacy. Basically, Mozilla needs money, and they’re selling their souls in order to get it.

If you’re like me, and you just want a good browser that doesn’t have a ton of bloat, that isn’t taking your private data and selling it to some corporation, or what-have-you, then you already know what you need.

A better browser.

Firefox has been my go-to for a long time. It’s a decent browser! But, if I decide I want to actually interact with AI, I don’t need it embedded in frikken’ Firefox. And I don’t think this is where their resources, their time, and their effort should be going.

That’s why I’ve switched to Vivaldi. A browser I think I’ve heard of before, but never really used? Never-the-less, I was pretty surprised when I finally did. I mean, right off the bat, they’ve pledged not to dedicate resources to integrate AI into their browser. Which, for all intents and purposes, that’s all you gotta say!

As such, it does not feel right to bundle any such solution into Vivaldi. There is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile. We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.

I’m a very hard-no on AI generated “art.” Ripping people off in order to funnel money into people’s pockets, who’ve done nothing but write a sentence, is the epitome of evil and greed. Using regular AI to generate text, or books, or anything of the sort, is definitely the same kind of plagiarist evil. But, I will acknowledge that there can be some uses in regard to AI chat bots … even though the power consumption is just as bad, or worse than the blockchain and NFTs. So, I find it really hard to justify using them. I have, though. I’ve asked an AI for some ideas on writing prompts to get my juices flowing. I’ve used an AI over my phone at work to help customers when I don’t know the answer to, “What kind of battery do I need for a Ford Pinto 1992, 4 cylinder, special edition, Pro Max?” And it has helped.

I will admit, and be transparent, in that I have personally found some use in these things. But I also ask myself, “Could I have just found this information on a search engine that isn’t mired by crud? Could I have done it without using a machine that’s on its way to being hooked up to a nuclear reactor twenty miles away from me?”

But, all of that’s beside my point in this article, in that, Vivaldi isn’t going to put this stuff into their browser. And they’re not ignoring their userbase in order to do whatever they want, for profit, and for violation of privacy. And that’s a big breath of fresh air.

And all of this is completely aside from the absolutely cool as hell features Vivaldi has built-in.

The browser … AUTOMATICALLY BLOCKS ADS! You don’t need an extension! IT WORKS ON YOUTUBE. You can just view websites, ad-free, by … opening your web browser? Holy crap.

Of course, you have customization options, sync options, theme options, password and bookmark import and saving, and so on and so forth. But what I’ve found really useful, is the right-side bar that you can connect to your Apple calendar, and the RSS feed aggregator that you can just plug some RSS into, and see updates from all the blogs you read, live, right there on the side of your browser. There’s a translate button, a note button, a reminders button, a button that opens their personal Vivaldi Mastodon instance, and so much more.

It’s the end-all, be-all of browsers, and I cannot believe that this isn’t some super famous, extremely well-known browser and company that’s taking the entire world by storm … Because they should be.

Anyway, I just wanted to write about how impressed I am with the Vivaldi browser. I can’t say I’m too sure what’s going on with the Social Web Foundation, but what that entails for sure remains to be seen.

I think you should give it a go.