Is it just me or is it a bit sad that even GPL'd software has websites that are full of Claudisms these days?
Like have some pride when showing off your project. Write a few sentences. Why should I give a shit about your project when you don't even care enough to describe it in your own words?
It's better than nothing but it's still far behind uBlock Origin or even the Brave's built-in ad blocker. Their decision to stop supporting uBlock Origin made me drop it as my alternative browser.
For me, Vivaldi has 2 major advantages in comparison with Firefox and Chrome, which I also use.
One is that Vivaldi can be controlled with mouse gestures. Mouse gestures can provide a much more convenient user interface for most GUI programs (by avoiding to switch your hand between mouse and keyboard), but unfortunately very few programs have been using them.
The other is even more important for me. The Vivaldi command to print a Web page frequently functions correctly, i.e. what is rendered in the printed file is the same as what the browser renders on the computer display.
In contrast, both Firefox and Chrome almost never render correctly a printed Web page, even if they render it correctly on the display. In Firefox and Chrome the printed page is usually corrupted, with various graphic elements scaled and moved in a different way than on screen, so they overlap over each other.
Give Ardia a try, its the closest I've seen to get an Arc like experience from a fully open source browser. Some small bugs still but development is very active and fixes are coming rapidly.
For me Vivaldi on Linux has a 50% probability of freezing whenever I use Ctrl+F and type some text I am looking for, requiring killing and restarting the process.
It's been the case for years but I keep putting up with it because I can't live without side panels. No issues on Windows and MacOS.
I am using Gentoo Linux (no systemd) with XFCE (on X11, no Wayland).
In this environment, Vivaldi never freezes, regardless what you do.
So what you see is not related to Linux, but it is due to an interaction with something else that you use, perhaps Gnome, if that is what you use for the graphic desktop.
You should look at your "Vivaldi Settings: Keyboard", at the key bindings. Perhaps your CTRL+F is bound to something that is wrong for your system.
In that forum it says that you must edit the parameters of the command line with which Vivaldi is launched by your graphic desktop to get scrolling, if that is what you want.
I am pretty sure that the middle mouse button is not broken in Vivaldi on Linux.
It probably just has a different default behavior than what you expect, e.g. the middle button might have been allocated by default to mouse gestures, not to clipboard or scrolling or whatever you expect.
I am using Vivaldi, but I do not remember which was its default behavior, because I no longer use mice, but a stylus on a small graphic tablet, and I reconfigured Vivaldi for the buttons of my Wacom stylus.
In any case, if I had been using a mouse, I would have wanted to allocate the middle button to mouse gestures, because those are much more useful than the uses of the middle button for the X clipboard or for scrolling.
This reminds me I have to see what's up with my install. Tried running earlier and got a message that it's secure store is busted, and have options to switch profile or continue and lose data, and all profiles are similarly broken. Luckily I don't keep much in it beyond sites like GMail and anything else not very Firefox friendly. Hoping this doesn't mean I lose access to my Google account as it's only logged in there.
I have a question. My ISP, allegedly, knows what websites I go to. So why can't I pay my ISP an optional $20 a month that gets evenly distributed directly to those websites, in exchange for an ad-free web experience?
Surely I'm not creating much more than $20 in ad revenue in total per month, right? Can't we just cut out the middleman and all walk away happy?
People have been trying stuff like this for almost 20 years now.
The core problem is that while people hold up that ads are the problem, the actual problem is that people like free stuff with no strings attached, i.e. have your cake (the content) and eat it too (nothing traded for it).
So when you present people an alternate way to compensate creators directly, they overwhelmingly just stick with ad blocking. There is a long case file of fools taking the internet at their word that "I want to give but the ads are so bad I can't!". They don't want to give lol
The problem is that the choice isn't seeing ads v.s. paying for the content. Instead, the choice is seeing ads v.s. overpaying for the content, then seeing ads anyway when the service decides to indroduce ads back to the paid subscription. By overpaying, I mean compared to what the service itself values its content at when it serves it for free with ads.
How many people would sign up for a 15$ per month subscription to read one article with no ads? How many would pay 1¢ once to read the article with no ads? How many would sign up for one 15$ per month subscription to see no ads anywhere?
I realize we don't have the infrastructure to make high volume 1¢ payments, and probably not for lack of trying, but I just don't think the core problem is that people only want stuff for 0¢ and not almost 0¢.
ISPs have their own DNS servers they could use to those block ads, ie. a network-wide Pihole. Paying the Spotify for Adblock fee could get you access to the "premium" DNS servers.
It would still be an arms race, but I'm just spitballing here.
Longer. Microtransactions online dates back to DigiCash[1], founded in 1989 and with their first issue online of "CyberCash" in 1994 - I remember testing it at university briefly. When microtransactions quickly started turning out to be cumbersome on an individual basis that quickly made some people pivot to the idea of bundling on the user side and have the system pay it out with microtransactions on the publisher side...
I agree with the caveats you outline, though. I think to work, something like this would need to be a box you'd tick when signing up for your ISP that promised some "ad free premium access to [X number] of sites" or similar, and you'd trade entirely on it being big name sites. Even then I'd expect relatively limited takeup mostly from people unaware of ad blockers.
The problem is I don't want surveillance and I don't want to incentivize trying to distract me (the "attention economy"). "Creators" just don't want to acknowledge that much of their "content" has zero or negative value to most people, and instead claim that everyone just wants free stuff. No, I want most of these "creators" to stop creating.
I don't think that's the case. I think the problem is that the sort of market behavior that would drive a company to run invasive ads in the first place betrays its fundamental lack of respect for its users. I want to pay for stuff. And I have tried. Even in doing so, I've found piracy is still often the superior service to using what I'm actually paying for.
Exactly. I'm not opposed to paying a few bucks a month to a website I visit a lot, but that adds up. At some point a "Netflix for Adblocking" starts to make sense.
This[1] claims the average American is worth about $1605/year in ad revenue. It's a model, so it's certainly possible it is significantly off. That said if there was a credible system like this, I'd happily pay for even the right partial offering.
I'm not sure why your ISP should be involved. Ideally they don't know what sites you're visiting. Your browser knows, though. And what you're describing is kind of what Brave tried to do with BAT (and kind of failed at).
How many websites do you go to a month? Hundreds? Thousands? And you want the ISP to handle the payment processing out to them? Many probably international? And each ISP doing this on their own?
Sure, why not? They're billion dollar corporations, they can handle some basic payment processing. If it creates a genuinely better user experience, it will increase customer loyalty and make them money in the long run.
I'd rather my ISP and ad networks have harsh criminal penalties with prison time for management, engineers, and everyone else involved for tracking what sites I visit. That would be a genuinely better experience.
I mean, I obviously agree...but time and time again, consumers keep showing that they're willing to give up privacy for a bit of convenience. Might as well use that to make the web a better place.
Speaking as someone who managed to get uncle Murdoch to sponsor writing an adblocker/payment tool similar to yours (while I was working at an adtech business), but then got stalled by the publishers (who on avg. hated ads), specifically the direct supply sales people (who tend to have louder voices in those companies, have mortgages to pay) -- the issue is systemic.
ISPs are already selling your data to a bunch of data brokers, I don't think ad spend is the only goal there.
Well, your ISP likely _doesn't_ know which sites you are going to.
In the old days, they'd run proxies, but with SSL, they no longer know where they are going, only that they are, for example, going to an AWS or GCP site.
You can. You can also try out Ladybird or any of the Fx's forks.
I quit Firefox after a long ride because I got tired of slow loading times, and scrolling that I wasn't able to fix. No matter the settings it's still not as good as in Chrome.
[0]: https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
Shame there's no way to check something else isn't included too.
https://nordstjernen.org/index.html
Like have some pride when showing off your project. Write a few sentences. Why should I give a shit about your project when you don't even care enough to describe it in your own words?
The homepage mentions this:
"It ships no telemetry of any kind, and deliberately includes no AI assistant and no AI-style web APIs."
I am not sure the website is AI generated. Can you be more specific why you think this is the case?
One is that Vivaldi can be controlled with mouse gestures. Mouse gestures can provide a much more convenient user interface for most GUI programs (by avoiding to switch your hand between mouse and keyboard), but unfortunately very few programs have been using them.
The other is even more important for me. The Vivaldi command to print a Web page frequently functions correctly, i.e. what is rendered in the printed file is the same as what the browser renders on the computer display.
In contrast, both Firefox and Chrome almost never render correctly a printed Web page, even if they render it correctly on the display. In Firefox and Chrome the printed page is usually corrupted, with various graphic elements scaled and moved in a different way than on screen, so they overlap over each other.
It really is nice to have a browser from a company whose incentives seem to be for the actual users.
HN hivemind, any ideas why?
In this environment, Vivaldi never freezes, regardless what you do.
So what you see is not related to Linux, but it is due to an interaction with something else that you use, perhaps Gnome, if that is what you use for the graphic desktop.
You should look at your "Vivaldi Settings: Keyboard", at the key bindings. Perhaps your CTRL+F is bound to something that is wrong for your system.
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/102072/no-autoscroll-on-midd...
I am pretty sure that the middle mouse button is not broken in Vivaldi on Linux.
It probably just has a different default behavior than what you expect, e.g. the middle button might have been allocated by default to mouse gestures, not to clipboard or scrolling or whatever you expect.
I am using Vivaldi, but I do not remember which was its default behavior, because I no longer use mice, but a stylus on a small graphic tablet, and I reconfigured Vivaldi for the buttons of my Wacom stylus.
In any case, if I had been using a mouse, I would have wanted to allocate the middle button to mouse gestures, because those are much more useful than the uses of the middle button for the X clipboard or for scrolling.
It was about how the default keyring was called, and that the name of the keyring ia actually case sensitive.
Surely I'm not creating much more than $20 in ad revenue in total per month, right? Can't we just cut out the middleman and all walk away happy?
The core problem is that while people hold up that ads are the problem, the actual problem is that people like free stuff with no strings attached, i.e. have your cake (the content) and eat it too (nothing traded for it).
So when you present people an alternate way to compensate creators directly, they overwhelmingly just stick with ad blocking. There is a long case file of fools taking the internet at their word that "I want to give but the ads are so bad I can't!". They don't want to give lol
How many people would sign up for a 15$ per month subscription to read one article with no ads? How many would pay 1¢ once to read the article with no ads? How many would sign up for one 15$ per month subscription to see no ads anywhere?
I realize we don't have the infrastructure to make high volume 1¢ payments, and probably not for lack of trying, but I just don't think the core problem is that people only want stuff for 0¢ and not almost 0¢.
It would still be an arms race, but I'm just spitballing here.
I agree with the caveats you outline, though. I think to work, something like this would need to be a box you'd tick when signing up for your ISP that promised some "ad free premium access to [X number] of sites" or similar, and you'd trade entirely on it being big name sites. Even then I'd expect relatively limited takeup mostly from people unaware of ad blockers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash
I'm aware I'm preaching to the choir here on HN, but boy are there strings...
[1] https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google
ISPs are already selling your data to a bunch of data brokers, I don't think ad spend is the only goal there.
In the old days, they'd run proxies, but with SSL, they no longer know where they are going, only that they are, for example, going to an AWS or GCP site.
That is basically the whole premise of the Brave browser though.
I quit Firefox after a long ride because I got tired of slow loading times, and scrolling that I wasn't able to fix. No matter the settings it's still not as good as in Chrome.