I only really realised this yesterday after someone sent me an article about issues with Firefox’s heavy resource usage. I suppose it was a lazy assumption on my part that because Vivaldi was based on Chromium, it would also be open source. So Vivaldi is free to use with a wonderful UI, but it’s the UI part that is not open source.
The reasons are given in the linked article below but I think its pretty lame if you benefit yourself off building on someone else’s open source project, but don’t want anyone else to do the same to your project. As Vivaldi won’t work without that UI, it is not even open core (it’s not functional at all without the UI). So in short Vivaldi is not open source. You either have a basic functional open source product, or you don’t.
So I have ditched Firefox for Brave for now (much faster although vertical tabs are not as great) and as I use two browsers on two monitors I’m thinking about the Vivaldi side – maybe pure Chromium but I’ll check some other options out too as long as they sync to mobile.
See Vivaldi browser and open-source | Vivaldi Browser
#technology #opensource #browsers
People who are involved in the open-source community often ask us why Vivaldi browser isn’t available under a unified open-source license. Here we explain why.