this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2022
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If you read my posts, you will see that I also use FF and I know that the issue with Google is les than in other browsers, but even Mozilla need money for its infrastructure, servers need money. Their business model is the advertising and by usin Alphabet, which is the associate company, they pass userdata in this model. Even there are few data, I prefer a browser which don't has this business model de surveillance and advertisings for my daily use. Currently there are a lot of browsers in the market, but when you search those which respects the privacy, there are only Vivaldi, Brave and also Firefox. Brave use some cryptosites as sponsores with a probably selective adblocking, which I don't like much, others are half discontinued, outdated engines or a bad support. The rest are Firefox and Vivaldi, because of this I've both, but using Vivaldi as main browser because of the reasons I mencioned before.
Right, so here's what I believe to be facts, without having sources to prove every little detail:
Firefox's main source of income is the default search engine deal with Google. Yes, they practically advertise Google Search by doing this, but they do not submit more data to Google than google.com itself would like to submit. If you change your default search engine, you're completely unaffected.
Mozilla also does some advertising, but they are building their own (privacy-friendly) advertising network for that. They are not collaborating with Google for that.
The use of Google Analytics is for telemetry only, so they can improve their software with anonymized data.
This isn't a great situation. Whenever they add privacy protections to Firefox, they're biting the hand that feeds them + they're competing with that hand + they need webpage owners to like them, too, since they have their own rendering engine.
But when it's a decision about a smaller implementation detail, those parties won't notice Mozilla's decision and then Mozilla will gladly opt for the most privacy/user-friendly option.
If it is a larger decision, like good ad blocking, then they will often not make it the default, but give users the option to install an extension or change a setting. This is also especially driven by the Tor Browser devs, who need these capabilities and if they're not contained in Firefox, they need to maintain their own patches on top of Firefox.
So, with Firefox, we have a finance model that requires the user to configure a few things to get the most privacy-friendly option possible.
Vivaldi, Brave et al have a different model. They need significantly less money, because they're not building their own engine. More than 99% of their code base is taken verbatim from Chromium/Blink. Those smaller implementation details were all decided on by Google.
And then they add content blockers on top to try to fix that.
This finance model generally allows them to be more privacy-friendly out of the box. But with 15 minutes of customizing Firefox, you get a privacy-friendly browser like no Chromium-based browser will ever be.
The Engine in Vivaldi has as base Chromium, but that didn't mean that te maintance work is minor than in Gecko, see https://lemmy.ml/post/361337. Vivaldi is a coop own by it's employees, they have ca 20 devs for 5 OS. Mozilla have their own engine, Gecko, but the work to update and patch is now rhe same as Vivaldi has with Chromium. You would be right that the Chromium browsers already have 99% of the work done, if Vivaldi were just a simple fork like others, which is not the case. The main expenses for a company, be it Mozilla or Vivaldi, is the infrastructure they have (server, tax expenses, personnel, etc.). Vivaldi has no outside investors and refuses to have any in order to preserve independence, von Tetzchner set up the cooperative with his own money. Now it is financed, as I said before, apart from donations (introduced at the insistence of users), sponsor links and default search engines (alliances with DDG, Ecosia and others), which pay when the user uses them, otherwise it is free. to delete them, apart a webstore with Merch. There are no advertisers involved, no google analytics or other google tracking or fingerprinting APIs. Apart Vivaldi offers for the user a own blog and a own webmail with 5Gb (xxxxx@vivaldi.net). Inbuild in the Browser a Feedreader, Mail client and Calendar, among other features which nobody else have or only partial with a lot of extensions. Yes, part of the UI is proprietary soft (~5%) but full aditable and customizable by the user (with knowledge in scripts). In the community they show how.