What are the cons of Vivaldi browser?

Is Vivaldi safer than Chrome?

I've been using Vivaldi for a while now.

I really like it, and so far, I haven't seen any security issues. But I recently saw this post on Hacker News:

It says, I'm considering switching my main browser from Chrome to Vivaldi because I'm pretty sure they don't have the NSA backdoors. This made me wonder if Vivaldi is as safe as Google's Chrome.

What's the deal? The author of that post said, I've been running Vivaldi and it's been super secure so far. The post says he switched to Vivaldi for privacy reasons.

But in this post, ?, he said, Chrome is safe. Why do we need to know the truth about this? Because security, privacy, and safety are very important to us. Vivaldi vs. Chrome Both Vivaldi and Chrome are based on Chromium. Both run in the browser environment. And both have Google apps.

We're not looking at the source code of Vivaldi.e. We can't tell what's in the source code of Vivaldi.

But we can get information about what's in the binary code of Vivaldi.e. And we can read this information.

So if we get information about what's in the binary code of Vivaldi, we can see if it's safe. If the binary code of Vivaldi is safe, then Vivaldi is safe. If the binary code of Vivaldi is not safe, then it may not be safe. How to get the source code. The author of that post said he got the source code from the Vivaldi web site. The Vivaldi web site says that it can give you source code of Vivaldi, but it's only available for Windows. And it doesn't say how you can get the source code.

Can you get the source code from other places? Yes. You can get the source code from GitHub.

There's a version of Vivaldi on GitHub. It's called Chromium.

Is Vivaldi a Chinese company?

This was what had made me click on Vivaldi's website the other day.

(I should tell you that I have no interest in web browsers; I'm a user of Vivaldi simply because I can get to my gmail and the rest of the usual tools for managing documents without going through Google's or Apple's walled-garden software programs. Which is not to say that Vivaldi is good, but it makes some useful things happen when you're logged into those walled gardens, whereas it doesn't really do much when you're not.)

Anyway, this Vivaldi page is pretty good -- not surprising from the same people who ran forties-era Radio China (where you're getting used to seeing Chinese pop culture references all over YouTube and the internet), but it's got a little bit of everything, and it's well done, as are its siblings. (Their sister site is a sort of English-Chinese mix.)

You know the story by now. A small company founded by developers and funded by their own money, working on software as a hobby.

I know the idea well, and I like the work. But at the end of the day, it's a Chinese company whose founder is Danish, and I think I was brought to the question of Vivaldi's nature more out of an instinctive, reflexive response than anything else.

As a general rule, a startup company of any description -- software, hardware, music -- is considered a Chinese startup company if a majority of its shareholders or management personnel or both come from China. That doesn't mean it has to be Chinese in origin; a group of American programmers working on a non-profit foundation, or a Russian software developer who never sets foot in Russia, or even an Italian man working in a small factory in Italy might all count as Chinese companies. But if you're building a company outside of a government-controlled, highly-centralized environment -- and I'm thinking particularly of the startup world, but there are plenty of analogs for "startup" in established industries -- chances are that the owners/managers are going to be Chinese.

And most probably they're going to be either PRC government-controlled companies -- or their subsidiaries.