
Vivaldi makes History - arunmib
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-makes-history/?hl=en-us&version=1.8.770.56&os=W10.0.14393
======
mynewtb
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984122)

------
notum
What happens tomorrow, if Vivaldi becomes history? Do we own this data? How is
it stored? Where is it located? Can we access this with any other tool?

I know I'm begging for down-votes but I simply cannot understand how people
can commit something as personal as web browsing to a closed source solution.

~~~
0xCMP
Also their privacy policy is pretty direct about them not collecting much
information.

[https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/](https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/)

Not a sure thing obviously, but it's something I haven't seen mentioned yet
here.

~~~
actsasbuffoon
That's a great privacy policy! It's brief and clearly worded.

I'd been holding off on using Vivaldi because I wanted to know exactly what
information was being collected. I tried to find the privacy policy on their
site, but could only find the one regarding the data their website collects.

To the Vivaldi team: You might consider making this privacy policy more
prominent on your site. Not being able to find it was literally the only
reason I hadn't tried your browser until now.

------
DanielBMarkham
Meta: I find it odd that we live and work on an internet where everything we
do is tracked and logged in fine detail. Huge companies do this every second
of every day. Many folks, including me, don't like it. Each day my feed is
full of news from these companies offering new products and services.

But when a new company comes along that is trying to break that cycle?
Suddenly a ton of people pop out of the woodwork to warn us there might be a
privacy concern.

Ok sure, but where the hell were you guys when Apple talked about it's new
file system, or LG released new smart TVs, or when a dozen other newsworthy
things happened in the last week from big companies who are scooping up all of
our data? These are not companies that _might_ scoop up data. These are
companies that are _already doing it_.

Look, I'm full-bore tinfoil hat guy, but after watching this for years, there
seems to be a lot of selective outrage going on online. Some folks get a free
pass. Some folks get trashed for much less. I find that very odd.

------
timonovici
While I rarely looked at the code behind a browser (mostly webkit, to debug
some weird stuff with capybara-webkit), it is highly uncomfortable to me to
use a non-free browser... Does it track my behavior, do they sell that
information - I don't have time to mess around with Wireshark and see what it
does;

On the "history" upgrade idea - that's a really cool one; It's quite often
that I'm looking for that page I accessed last year, or that youtube video
somebody sent me a few months ago, and I forgot it's name - hopefully
chromium/firefox steal this idea and improve upon it;

~~~
pasta
Your argument about the closed source is weak. Messing around with Wireshark
is probably quicker than reading thousands of locs.

I understand the value of open source. But I'm still not sure if it matters. A
lot of people think that open source software does not track personal data.
But how do they know? Have they read all the code? Do they even understand all
code?

It's much easier to run Wireshark to check what the program does. That's how
the world found out about what Windows 10 is sending to MS.

In the end it's about trust.

~~~
Sylos
Open-source doesn't just mean that you can view the source code. It also means
that anyone can take the source code, make changes to it and distribute their
new version.

This means that if an open-source project does nefarious things, there's a
good chance that a fork will come along and that people will start using that
fork instead. So, you yourself don't have to read every single line of code
for it to be relatively certain that an open-source project does not do bad
things.

There are of course exceptions to this. For example there are a lot of things
that a lot of people are not fond of with Chromium. There are forks which try
to address this (for example [0]), but Google has so much development
workforce behind Chromium that such a fork has a hard time keeping up with
merging security patches and updates in general.

But even in that case, open-source offers protection without you reading every
line of code. Because there's people out there who earn their daily bread by
uncovering these sort of things: Journalists.

Due to the source code being available, they have definitive proof and can
slap these kind of stories on the front page. I mean, heck, Heart Bleed came
on national TV in my country. If that vulnerability had been in closed-source
software, they could have only ever reported about rumors.

[0]: [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

------
Aeyris
As nice as all the features they've added are, I can't help but see Vivaldi as
"Chromium but Blink probably isn't completely up to date", and it worries me
more than a little to use a browser where the latest (potentially high impact)
changes to the browser rendering engine aren't remedied until the next browser
patch.

~~~
dzek69
I'm using Vivaldi since first public release and I haven't encountered any
issue regarding to Blink stability.

I'm using only newest snapshots (so they should be considered unstable) as my
daily work & private browser and never had a reason to roll back. IIRC they
using even nightlies from Blink in their snapshots, so "getting behind"
shouldn't be considered a problem I think.

But putting everything aside, let's assume they're 40 days behind Blink always
- are you THAT geeky that you need these new Blink features instantly, when
noone actually implements them anywhere (I'm taking about new JS stuff for
example), because noone would be able to use this features, as this is
cutting-edge-blink-only-feature?

~~~
Aeyris
I'm talking about security issues, specifically. A lot of the vulnerabilities
found within Chrome[0] would be actually within Blink.

0: [http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-
Chrome.html?v...](http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-
Chrome.html?vendor_id=1224)

------
partycoder
I have used tools like this in the past, to track how I spend my time while
browsing.

I made it a habit to look at the tool after a session of browsing, and try to
understand if my browsing was productive or not. Then try to think what I
would to differently the next time.

This can help improving your browsing habits.

Now, the title feels a bit like clickbait (had to click to get an idea of what
it was about).

------
jpalomaki
One so-far-unsolved problem for me in browsers is how to make using multiple
profiles at the same time smooth without adding many windows to desktop.

I'm using Chrome and run several profiles: personal, work, social media etc.
Since I tend to use all of these throughout the day, I have several browser
windows and several tabs. This is not very convenient. I would prefer system
where I could share the same window with multiple profiles, maybe even having
a list a combined list of tabs from different profiles on the left side.

~~~
Vinnl
Mozilla is actually working on this for Firefox, and you can try it right now
through their Test Pilot extension. I've been using it for a while now and
it's pretty great:
[https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers)

------
org3432
It's good to see a company trying to push browsers forward again. Seems like
once again things have stagnated a bit with the current browser experiences.

------
digitalshankar
Vivaldi looks so stable and rock solid, uses Blink engine, although the title
is a clickbait. About the history feature, if a website is important i will
bookmark it, i want history only for that session, not save it for future
search, again that's my opinion. However the features like tab muting, taking
notes are very good and that's what the user needs. Wish it would have been
Open Source. I prefer Vivaldi over IE. But Firefox MasterRace!

~~~
vorticalbox
> About the history feature, if a website is important i will bookmark it, i
> want history only for that session, not save it for future search, again
> that's my opinion.

100% on this, Though I will say it is a very cool feature.

------
buro9
Wouldn't it be great if the browser could be configured to simply sync this
information to a calendar app of your choosing?

This way, be it local or an online service like Google Calendar, the data
would be under your control and would make sense across computers, and could
be viewed in relation to other time-based data.

i.e. if your tweets also ended up in a calendar you could see the tweets that
led to a browse, that led to a bookmark, that led to a new tweet. You could
later on make sense of your own activities.

If I were at Google, this is what I'd want to work on: How to bring together
data to make it useful for the user, rather than just useful as part of a
profile for advertisers. History is a lot less scary when it provides the user
with the bulk of the value.

~~~
userbinator
_History is a lot less scary when it provides the user with the bulk of the
value._

On the other hand, I'd argue that showing it at that level of detail to the
user makes it _more_ scary.

------
callesgg
Would prefer it, if it was simply a plugin.

------
PleaseHelpMe
Syncing feature is still missing while a lot of things are being introduced,
which is hard to tolerate.

------
aluhut
My first thoughts on this:

\- I still won't use it because googling/favorites are faster.

\- Somebody might find this useful if he/she wants to spy on the user.

Not sure if the time investment was worth it. I only use it as a reference
browser.

