this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Vivaldi is including its own adblock outside of the manifest system that uses many of the same blocklists that uBlock does (although at this point you have to add them manually) and hopes to get near the same functionality by the time it is pulled and Mv3 is implemented. They originally had plans to offer a Mv2 compliant area but after seeing how Mv3 was going to be implemented, they changed there plans to many users dismay.
I don't think many people use Vivaldi. Also it is mostly proprietary so that's a hard pass for me.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/
Only the UI part is not open source.
What's the point of keeping part of the UI closed source?
I've seen their reasoning, but I don't agree with it. The biggest counterexample to their concerns are other browsers: Firefox is no trouble maintaining its IP, and Brave is fully open source yet has not been formed once AFAIK.
In my personal experience, and with great regret, I must say that Brave does a better job with its built-in ad blocking than Vivaldi has. Even after I did my damnedest to tweak the ad blocker settings (adding more lists from more sources, removing the "allow some ads" list, etc).
Brave itself is filled with ads. Crypto wallets, BAT, VPNs. I just want a browser.
But how else will Brandon Eich fund his homophobia and covid conspiracies?
I'm very aware of its built-in bloat, but the ad blocking still seems to perform more like an MV2 ad blocker than an MV3 one (more is blocked even when using the same lists), and it allows you to natively select individual elements to block yourself.
Well that is because Brave has been doing it longer, and Vivaldi only has about 30 devs across all the platforms, which is a fraction of Brave, although Brave has its issues as well, just not in the adblock department. I have found that if you use the uBlock block lists it is most of the way there, but it is not ready yet and I think that Vivaldi will have to consider picking up some dedicated devs. Also it is a 'Vivaldi Thing' to launch things piece mail and get those pieces working fully before adding on the rest of it. Then over time it gets good. But Vivaldi has come a LONG way when it comes to aggressive adblock detection.
That being said right now YouTube is detecting it and it is dumping the most manpower and money into this. When it does work you can pretty much use it across the web and the few cases that it doesn't work usually OK just to pause it for a while and you won't get too many ads.
However if Mv3 comes out and they haven't gotten their act together I am going to Firefox or Brave, as much as I don't like how they do business. Then there will be the Google Search thing running through the courts and we will see how Fx and Br come out and change their model.