Then we need to have a discussion about that because in case of Vivaldi you are in fact not the product.
I'm not sure if this [1] is still relevant, but it appears that Vivaldi makes money by promoting search engines and bookmarks to their users via their closed source, secret, Chromium fork.
If my usage of their Chromium clone is being used to sell search engines/website bookmarks, then I am indeed the product.
There does also seem to be a VPN option on their site that I'm assuming I can pay for, which seems it could be an actually buyable product rather than selling my usage of their browser.
I’m really curious what gave you this impression. Vivaldi doesn’t hide its business model, yet you were so confident!
- The choice in the wizard defaults to no blocking of ads and trackers
- Third Party cookies enabled by default
- WebRTC IP leaking is the default
- No option not to persist history/permanent incognito mode
Etc
I imagine it leaks your list of extensions just like chromium too
That's something I've always wanted.
Only Firefox seems to offer it. Firefox can also open external links in incognito (eg if you tap a link in another app, it will open in a firefox private window)
Duckduckgo browser and Brave can be set to delete all data upon start, which is similar but not quite the same because things are still persisted until they're cleaned up at the next start (they say it happens on exit but it really happens on start, because catching exit isn't reliable or something).
Brave also has no way to have exceptions for certain websites (Duckduckgo can, they call it fireproofing).