Vivaldi 8.3 for Desktop: make bad ads sad
vivaldi.com
vivaldi.com
[0]: https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
Like have some pride when showing off your project. Write a few sentences. Why should I give a shit about your project when you don't even care enough to describe it in your own words?
The homepage mentions this:
"It ships no telemetry of any kind, and deliberately includes no AI assistant and no AI-style web APIs."
I am not sure the website is AI generated. Can you be more specific why you think this is the case?
It is apparently furtive slop.
Shame there's no way to check something else isn't included too.
It really is nice to have a browser from a company whose incentives seem to be for the actual users.
One is that Vivaldi can be controlled with mouse gestures. Mouse gestures can provide a much more convenient user interface for most GUI programs (by avoiding to switch your hand between mouse and keyboard), but unfortunately very few programs have been using them.
The other is even more important for me. The Vivaldi command to print a Web page frequently functions correctly, i.e. what is rendered in the printed file is the same as what the browser renders on the computer display.
In contrast, both Firefox and Chrome almost never render correctly a printed Web page, even if they render it correctly on the display. In Firefox and Chrome the printed page is usually corrupted, with various graphic elements scaled and moved in a different way than on screen, so they overlap over each other.
HN hivemind, any ideas why?
In this environment, Vivaldi never freezes, regardless what you do.
So what you see is not related to Linux, but it is due to an interaction with something else that you use, perhaps Gnome, if that is what you use for the graphic desktop.
You should look at your "Vivaldi Settings: Keyboard", at the key bindings. Perhaps your CTRL+F is bound to something that is wrong for your system.
It was about how the default keyring was called, and that the name of the keyring ia actually case sensitive.
That's harder on Linux, with Windows I usually had to only copy appdata for the user and everything would be flawless. I don't know exactly what's different with Linux Vivaldi installs, but it almost always breaks like this.
There are Singleton lock files in .config/vivaldi[-snapshot] that can be deleted if the profiles aren't protected by a keyring.
If the profiles are protected by either KWallet or Gnome-libsecret, you need to unlock that keyring before starting Vivaldi. If you moved to a KDE or Gnome desktop environment from something like Niri or Hyprland, or vice versa, this can happen.
With Vivaldi closed, back up ~/.config/vivaldi/ or ~/.config/vivaldi-snapshot, then try launching with the original backend:
vivaldi-stable --password-store=kwallet6
vivaldi-stable --password-store=kwallet5
vivaldi-stable --password-store=gnome-libsecret
vivaldi-stable --password-store=basic (only if the original profile used it; not recommended for regular use) I had to do this when I went from Hyprland to KDE Plasma and KDE Wallet made it so I couldn't open Vivaldi when I logged into the Hyprland session.
For KWallet/libsecret, the original wallet must also be available and unlocked.
Surely I'm not creating much more than $20 in ad revenue in total per month, right? Can't we just cut out the middleman and all walk away happy?
In the old days, they'd run proxies, but with SSL, they no longer know where they are going, only that they are, for example, going to an AWS or GCP site.
ISPs are already selling your data to a bunch of data brokers, I don't think ad spend is the only goal there.
The core problem is that while people hold up that ads are the problem, the actual problem is that people like free stuff with no strings attached, i.e. have your cake (the content) and eat it too (nothing traded for it).
So when you present people an alternate way to compensate creators directly, they overwhelmingly just stick with ad blocking. There is a long case file of fools taking the internet at their word that "I want to give but the ads are so bad I can't!". They don't want to give lol
I'm aware I'm preaching to the choir here on HN, but boy are there strings...
How many people would sign up for a 15$ per month subscription to read one article with no ads? How many would pay 1¢ once to read the article with no ads? How many would sign up for one 15$ per month subscription to see no ads anywhere?
I realize we don't have the infrastructure to make high volume 1¢ payments, and probably not for lack of trying, but I just don't think the core problem is that people only want stuff for 0¢ and not almost 0¢.
It would still be an arms race, but I'm just spitballing here.
I agree with the caveats you outline, though. I think to work, something like this would need to be a box you'd tick when signing up for your ISP that promised some "ad free premium access to [X number] of sites" or similar, and you'd trade entirely on it being big name sites. Even then I'd expect relatively limited takeup mostly from people unaware of ad blockers.
That is basically the whole premise of the Brave browser though.
[1] https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/102072/no-autoscroll-on-midd...
I am pretty sure that the middle mouse button is not broken in Vivaldi on Linux.
It probably just has a different default behavior than what you expect, e.g. the middle button might have been allocated by default to mouse gestures, not to clipboard or scrolling or whatever you expect.
I am using Vivaldi, but I do not remember which was its default behavior, because I no longer use mice, but a stylus on a small graphic tablet, and I reconfigured Vivaldi for the buttons of my Wacom stylus.
In any case, if I had been using a mouse, I would have wanted to allocate the middle button to mouse gestures, because those are much more useful than the uses of the middle button for the X clipboard or for scrolling.
You could be using Firefox with MV2 extensions instead which would sound far less ridiculous than "I am using Vivaldi (Chromium) while refusing to (ever) update it"
I updated to whatever the next version was, and it disabled all my MV2 extensions (mainly uBO). I figured that they kept MV2 support going as long as they could, and there was recently a patch by Google that removed the support for good, so that must be the end of it. So I downgraded back.
Did you have to do anything to reenable MV2 extensions? Or maybe it was a just bug they fixed later?
edit: and now scrolling is laggy sometimes. Sigh. How do they manage to fuck up performance so consistently for no reason at all. It takes some special talent for sure. Opera was like that as well.
I quit Firefox after a long ride because I got tired of slow loading times, and scrolling that I wasn't able to fix. No matter the settings it's still not as good as in Chrome.