this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Because Blink is the best engine. Chromium, same as any other engine, is FOSS, therefore everyone, if want, can gutt out the Google crap it has by default, what the Vivaldi devs do very well in every update, leaving some Google APIs as options in the settings. If you desactivate eg the one of the Chrome Store, Vivaldi can't download extensions from there, because it isn't seen not longer as a Chromium. Vivaldi isn't a simple chromium fork, pasting just the own logo, there is a lot of work behind every new release.
To be fair it is just a Chromium backend with their custom frontend. And the value Vivaldi brings is in that frontend hence it's being proprietary.
Jón von Tetzchner mentioned they been talking internally about making it open source, but it's very unlikely.
It would be interesting if they made it fully open source. I hope they do, but fully understand if they don't.
Well, part of the script of the UI is proprietary, but it's 100% auditable and modificable by the user. The only point is that you can't use the script for other projects or browsers. It's not the same as in Chrome, Edge, Opera, there is nothing auditable in the script, apart from the Chromium script itself. Making the UI script in Vivaldi OpenSource, the first thing ocurres is that Chrome and Edge use it, killing all the other Chromiums, Vivaldi first. That isn't the same in the Gecko engine, there isn't any Big Brother using this engine. The engine isn't the real problem, most use Blink, because it's the best for several reasons, the problem is that the worst companies use it too and uniques developements and features which other company made, if it is released as OpenSource is a suicid for a small company, in a oversaturated and harsh Browser market (~100 browsers and forks), where the reason and sense of OpenSource is debatable. It is better to focus on other factors that are more important, business ethics with respect to the user, excellent support and a good community, the secondary services it offers, that it does not depend on external investors who can dictate the rules and that it does not create income from profiling the user to sell the data to others. Vivaldi complies with all this even in a political way, not being a company with a boss and his employees, but a cooperative, owned by its employees.
Please read the open source definition. Vivaldi doesn't meet it. You can't be kind of open source or partially open source. You either are or you are not.
That's pure bullshit. Neither Google not Microsoft give a shit about what others are doing. They don't onboard features from other open source Chromium browsers because they have their own vision.
And even if they wanted to implement similar feature they will have reinvent the wheel themselves instead of using code from open source, because under most open source licences you have to share the source code back and they are like exactly like Vivaldi. Using open source Chromium backend, with proprietary frontend.
You have fundamental lack of understanding how licensing works. And as you mentioned there are plenty of open source browsers that not only survive being open source, but thrive in their own niches.
There are a lot of good things about Vivaldi, but that doesn't make them bulletproof from valid critisim.
None of the browsers that exist are free of critical aspects and Vivaldi is no exception. That Google and EDGE are not interested in the Vivaldi UI is not true at all, it shows the attempt to imitate different functions introduced by Vivaldi with mediocre results. Although Vivaldi is still a minority browser, it is gaining a lot of acceptance in large companies and even in the automotive world with the inclusion of series in Renault, Polestar, Mercedes and even VAG, which not even Google has achieved, which can mean more than 40 million users in the near future. In other words, it can become a competitor to be taken seriously, as a European response to Google. From this point of view, this discrepancy of a script that differentiates Vivaldi from the others makes sense, although it does not conform to the traditional definition of OpenSource, since it is "Open" at the user level, but not to the competition for being owned by Vivaldi . Making it OpenSource, with restrictive licenses in the background, wouldn't change anything.
Sadly if google wants to screw ALL of them at once they can just change the licence. Of course they can keep the current and the previous versions. But then no security updates no feature updates. Didnt you ever thought about WHY did google open source it? To create a monopoly of chromium. That they controll when to screw over the "Chromium with extra steps" browsers. And if i am honest the company behind it doesnt have a good reputation, and never made anything else really FOSS, i call chromium freemium as it is foss for now but it can self destruct on a click on a button to screw all third party browsers at once. Use firefox is my all day recommendation. If you dont like firefox use librewolf. Its a REAL alternative with REAL open source software, there isnt a megacorp behind firefox rather a non-profit.
He can't change the license, precisely most of the Browsers are chromium, even those from the biggest companies. If Google make Chromium proprietary closed soft, Sundar Pichai will find his head on a stake the next day. He don't need it either, since he don't have to pay much attention to Chromium, irrelevant to Google's business. These are his dozens of services that he offer (Gmail, Gdrive, Maps, Google Earth, Workspace, YouTube, googleanalytics,...etc.), this is where he can gain power over others, this is exactly what he want to implement now with MEI DRM for web pages and their services, forcing all browsers to incorporate his Token, yes or yes, in order to access this sites and services, irrelevant if you use Chromium, Gecko, WebKit or anything else, with this is Google who decide which browser is worth to recive this token.
still if google just f*ck the browser and tell them go to google chrome or firefox and boom with the web drm more ads for everyone. I will bet 1k € they will do it ( in this way or other way ) redoing the licence and screwing up the third party browsers.
it will not happen, Google tried for years to use Chromium as a weapon against other chromium Browsers, without success and since even MS uses Chromium for EDGE, Google will prefer to bite a monogram in the gut, before following Chromium as a means of pressure, why mess with MS and incidentally with many other large companies would be shooting himself in the foot.
But as I said before, Chromium is irrelevant as such for Google, the pressure can be done much better from the web itself with all the services of the one it has and thousands of pages that directly or indirectly depend on them. Google does not have more influence on Chromium than it does on Mozilla currently, and does not need it anymore either. If he pulls off this MEI DRM shit, he'll have the ring to rule them all, regardless if they use Chromium, Gecko, WebKit or whatever, Game Over, internet is owned by Google.