Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and founder of Vivaldi Technologies, refuses to integrate AI features in its browser and wants human engineers, not AI, to write its code.
Build Vivaldi on top of Firefox rather than Chrome, and I’m in.
Just use Firefox. It doesn’t have any AI built into it as far as I’m aware.
Tetzchner says the company asked its users whether they wanted added AI features, and the response was “no.”
Revolutionary technique, asking if anyone wants a feature before you go all-in on it.
Remind me in a year (2027-11-13): Vivaldi has gone bankrupt.
This guy is my new hero.
This ai stuff is like the new clippy the paperclip, GTFO of my phone.
I don’t want features just rolled out without my consent.
Long term I will have to install custom roms and get bank cards from my bank again thanks to AI.
I hate the fact that it’s so hard to buy an android phone without it coming with a load of proprietary apps that I can’t remove. If I want their casino shit, their stupid health apps, whatever - I’ll download it myself. Being unable to uninstall it really pisses me off. I’m pretty sure it’s practically malware. And the AI shit is just as bad - phone I’m on now came with at least 3 different AI apps for whatever. I did actually manage to remove two, but they keep trying to reinstall, could be hiding behind my launcher. And I bought this phone 2 years ago, I can only imagine it’s even harder to get away from these days.
Maybe I’m out of touch, but I think most people just want an operating system and the opportunity to install what they want on it.
AI is much too energy consuming to be a default option.
adult person right here. true G.
I really hope Vivaldi stays good. It’s basically the only browser I’m considering usable. I’ll make do with something else in a pinch, but surfing the web without Vivaldi is like not having a hand.
I’m using it for stuff that doesn’t work without Chromium (like a translation tool that doesn’t break SPA forms) but yeah not being able to use my custom adblockers concerns me.
Same. If it weren’t a Chromium browser I’d explore it more, it seems to have a lot of neat options.
Waterfox is better, it’s open source, not based on chromium and has a split DNS resolution path through their own servers and cloudlfare. A few tweaks in about:config and it’s by far the best option out there.
Sure it is. Does it have mouse gestures?
And it’s also free of AI.
What are some of your about:config tweaks?
They should use AI testing to find exploits. It’s good at that.
I’d use Vivaldi if it wasn’t chrorium and closed source, sadly it’s such a turn off
The UI layer is the only part that’s closed source. Vivaldi’s UI is also one of the main reasons people use it.
Yeah but de facto i still cannot see what they put in there
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A good ol’ browser war in the comments to get the day started :/
A traditional past time of the internet.
Firefox has locally run AI features you can turn off easily. I don’t see the harm. Occasionally I use the translation feature for foreign websites.
If you ask me, Firefox gets a lot of shit and it’s blown completely out of proportion. Are they without flaw? Of course not, but it’s not nearly as bad as people want you to believe.Instead I switched to Waterfox which is just Firefox with all of the bullshit excluded.
The problem isn’t what is in Firefox now, it’s what will be in Firefox in the future. It’s their clearly established predilection for mindless trend-chasing and willingness to ignore their users’ clearly stated wishes in order to pack the damn thing full of crap nobody wants anyway rather than actually utilize their comparatively meager resources towards actually developing the actual browser part of the browser. That’s a huge issue.
AI features should be opt in, not opt out. Every time it updates it also often turns those features back on (at least a couple times for me)
I turned it off once and it stayed off.
the problem with Firefox AI implementation was more of a communication issue.
Firefox keeps adding stuff like this to its browser and it keeps messing up a good thing. I don’t mind them adding experiments, but they keep trying to add stuff that places them as intermediaries in some kind of convenient “service” that is offered.
for whatever reason they just can’t stop from shoving all that stuff into their main product instead treating it as a side project
It’s a purity race to oblivion : people who know and care use Firefox. They switched away from the default and by that very action they are in the tiny minority who actually has a grasp at problems and dare try to do something about. They are vocal about it, put efforts into the process so they in general want “more” and “better” according to their own criteria. It doesn’t stop there though, once they have moved away for privacy or open source or sovereignty or whatever else, they want the other criteria and it won’t stop.
It is recursive though, people who care a lot about some criteria move away from Firefox, the now “mainstream” within that community, then use e.g. Waterfox or LibreWolf. You can see this in any community which moves away from the mainstream choice really. There is a vocal minority within the minority and they do have genuine reasons and concern.
Once you use LibreWolf I bet there are other forks, etc, etc.
For those people what Firefox is doing is actually very bad because it goes back to what they wanted to move away from.
If its like a built in translator and a chat ui and you can opt-in(or at bare minimum opt-out) its fine for me I guess
“Customers don’t want it” is surprisingly difficult to understand for a lot of companies nowadays. Vivaldi must be run by some sort of language genius.
It’s a private compnay, they don’t have to follow shareholders so it explains it
Methinks shareholders should somehow be concerned what end users want.
Shareholders want the line to go up, currently AI is a thing that makes that happen, long-term effects be damned.
They are only concerned about money
Which is somehow related.
Not as related as they should be. Stock prices are based on belief, not on reality.
Yeah but they are usually not that smart, they only think in short term than long term
onlythinkaboutnextquarter then thinkaboutnextquarter
step 3) profit?
I want AI in my browser, as long as it is zero data retention (edit: used ZDR) and hosted in Europe with local hosting as an option. AND if it can be fully turned off.
Zdr?
Zero data retention
