Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and founder of Vivaldi Technologies, refuses to integrate AI features in its browser and wants human engineers, not AI, to write its code.
If we ignore privacy and open-source considerations for a moment, Vivaldi has been one of my favorite browsers. They embraced vertical tabs, they offer customizability instead of forcing everyone into the same mold, and it doesn’t have all the anti-features (AI specifically) that some other browsers have.
I’m gonna give them a high five while continuing to use LibreWolf/IronFox.
Imagine that tomorrow Tetschner goes crazy and starts dating a Chinese spy. Or joins the Trumpist sect…
I think AI should be a choice, not something every browser has to push on its users. Everyone has their own preferences.
So just the way Firefox does it? Only local models, all configurable?
The recent controversy on House House makes me (only a little) worried that for the next century, most people will be hardline 100% never-AI, instead of just “Stop shoving it everywhere, stop copying artwork”. As people like Bernie have said, it’s an automation technology that can have nice effects should those use cases receive careful consideration. We just don’t often get that consideration.
I will never understand why the push to AI was so freaking AGGRESSIVE. Like, take it, shove it down your throat, avoidance of AI is BANNED, type of bullshit. It should speak for itself when it works.
Im never leaving zen, its been stable for a while now, was so ass when I started using it, now I never lose anything, forgot it used to be rough
Does the vimium plugin work on zen yet? That was the only pain point that was holding me back from switching last time I tried it.
I will always advocate ai for shit like this, just make it work yourself, debug it by using it. Make it show you it’s work, sometimes it’s a simple edit, have it avoid restructuring and use minimal code. Can easily be done for free. Ik it’s obviously preferred to have official support but for things like plugins, I just get to use them now instead of waiting for my issue to never be resolved.
Eh, until there is actual support I’ll just use a browser that supports what I need. Zen is nice, but the difference isn’t great enough for me to want to spend a whole bunch of time making things work.
Tetzchner says the company asked its users whether they wanted added AI features, and the response was “no.”
Revolutionary technique, asking if anyone wants a feature before you go all-in on it.
- Microsoft enters the chat
also, yall stop saying firefox sucks because all web browsers capable of the bloated standards are de facto corporate controlled
“Customers don’t want it” is surprisingly difficult to understand for a lot of companies nowadays. Vivaldi must be run by some sort of language genius.
It’s a private compnay, they don’t have to follow shareholders so it explains it
Methinks shareholders should somehow be concerned what end users want.
Shareholders want the line to go up, currently AI is a thing that makes that happen, long-term effects be damned.
you don’t want to be the one that missed out by not jumping on the train.
Somehow and for now
They are only concerned about money
Which is somehow related.
Yeah but they are usually not that smart, they only think in short term than long term
We have very prominent cases where this is true. But is it also true in general? Idk
Basically any public company right now?
onlythinkaboutnextquarter then thinkaboutnextquarter
step 3) profit?Not as related as they should be. Stock prices are based on belief, not on reality.
It’s really dumb but it holds true. I work for a company that profits tens of millions per year, and we’re owned by one guy. I’ve worked at places that are owned by hedge funds or giant corporations like GE and you can just tell the difference. Here I’ve been told that if the shop needs something, it’s basically a blank check. The owner gave everyone in the company a $3 raise last year, and we get a 10% bonus of your salary annually as a profit sharing initiative. Annual raises are good, wages are excellent, benefits are some of the best in the country and they do everything they can to keep them as a low cost. We just happen to manufacture things that nobody else in the country does.
Compared to other other more typical companies it’s really night and day. I used to get a 3% annual raise and a “I can’t get you more even though I want to”. And some of the shittiest health insurance imaginable. My coworker broke his foot and they wouldn’t wait on him until he saw a specialist like wtf he literally just needed a cast
“wants”
it’s chromium, it uses ai. i think this guy wants to do marketing
Build Vivaldi on top of Firefox rather than Chrome, and I’m in.
Just use Firefox. It doesn’t have any AI built into it as far as I’m aware.
Unfortunately, vanilla Firefox does have AI built-in, as well as a lot of other garbage. Librewolf is a fork that strips out all that junk, and it bundles in some cool security features as well.
But apparently Vivaldi is good, too.
Its got a whole panel that pops open when you click the button in upper left corner under the tabs.
You can turn all the AI stuff off pretty easily, but yeah.
Yeah I mostly forget that panel even exists.
Then you may not be aware that it is has integrated AI features.
based af. I’m installing Vivaldi right now, holy shit.
It’s Chromium based.
I’m uninstalling it right now!
Yeah, loved Vivaldi until it started randomly corrupting my profiles after not starting up correctly. Now I’m back on Firefox -_-
They’re right. Vivaldi is based
…on chromium
the superior browser engine sorry not sorry (i’ve had way too much trouble with everything gecko-based even though i want to support it, the technical issues make it nearly impossible)
I’m not switching to Vivaldi, but it is refreshing to see someone say “I didn’t put X in the product because people don’t want X in the product.”
AI is just a more destructive and environmentally catastrophic NFT.
What do they have to do with each other?
In a mechanical sense not a whole lot, but in both the reason why they are being focused on and what it does to the cost of computer parts they are quite similar. NFTs, Metaverse, and AI have all gotten the focus they have because the tech industry has been chasing the high of the internet and later smart phone booms, they all want the next big thing but they are all ignorant to fact that the only reason said booms worked was because of the broad utility which AI and NFTs have little of.
NFT tried to be an alternative to currency, But it almost endangered the economy and general affordability guarantees the same way AI used up water sources and federally protected forests
To be clear NFTs tried to be a replacement to traditional proof of asset ownership like paper deeds and such. Then a bunch of people used that to create contracts for ownership of links to assets and sold that to speculative investors, aka morons, and thus another actually neat technology with a good niche dies.
Similar to the blockchain being an amazing technology that could instantly verify transactions with complete accuracy; and instead got used for alternative currencies.
Cryptocurrencies (blockchain-backed contract ownership of assigned mathematical conclusions) tried to be currency, NFTs in popular culture tried to be art (as in how art is actually bought and sold in the real world for money laundering.)
AI (GAN including LLMs), like blockchain and NFTs, has its extremely specific narrow use case for society - one that is currently overblown and is being used incorrectly in all parts of society, and wasting the resources used and tarnishing the technology at the same time.
Crypto is working out great for criminals and NK.
I’d use Vivaldi if it wasn’t chrorium and closed source, sadly it’s such a turn off
The UI layer is the only part that’s closed source. Vivaldi’s UI is also one of the main reasons people use it.
Yeah but de facto i still cannot see what they put in there
I, too, would use Vivaldi if it wasn’t Vivaldi.
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Isn’t Vivaldi largely open source?
the devs like to pretend that it is and say how only a small part of it is proprietary, but it’s a deceptive PR stunt because they’re counting the whole chromium source into that statistic. if we don’t consider the chromium source they didn’t write, their own vivaldi code is largely proprietary.
regardless, a program consisting of 99.9% free code and 0.1% proprietary code is proprietary as a whole - you can’t audit, modify or redistribute copies of it as long as any non-free code is present.
This ai stuff is like the new clippy the paperclip, GTFO of my phone.
I don’t want features just rolled out without my consent.
Long term I will have to install custom roms and get bank cards from my bank again thanks to AI.
I hate the fact that it’s so hard to buy an android phone without it coming with a load of proprietary apps that I can’t remove. If I want their casino shit, their stupid health apps, whatever - I’ll download it myself. Being unable to uninstall it really pisses me off. I’m pretty sure it’s practically malware. And the AI shit is just as bad - phone I’m on now came with at least 3 different AI apps for whatever. I did actually manage to remove two, but they keep trying to reinstall, could be hiding behind my launcher. And I bought this phone 2 years ago, I can only imagine it’s even harder to get away from these days.
Maybe I’m out of touch, but I think most people just want an operating system and the opportunity to install what they want on it.
One of the happy accidents that has come from American technofascism is this rennaisance of open-source programming and development and a renewed interest in digital sovereignty. People have been building alternatives to what the tech oligarchs have been cramming down our throats, and it’s not only more secure and more functional, it’s getting more and more accessible to the public.
Take Graphene and PostmarketOS for instance. They’re both extremely easy to install on the right hardware. I haven’t had any complaints yet! :)
I bought a Pixel 9A and a Pixel tablet and installed Graphene because I wanted control over my own device, no unnecessary spyware apps and no forced AI and the ability to just install what I want and both have been great. Everything I’ve needed has basically just worked (a couple of apps required me to change a setting) but there’s a few major outliers to that ‘it just works’ that fortunately I don’t need - like the VW app. I was shocked at how easy it was to install and by Lemmy standards I’m not very tech savvy (although I had an issue with a Linux update on my computer last night and was able to get it working again, so by normal people standards I’m a hacker lol).
Right now it’s fantastic but I worry Google’s crackdown on “sideloading” is going to hinder that open source adoption - anyone who has already done so is probably going to be less squeamish about a couple extra steps and whatever bullshit warnings Google throws at them but for new normies I worry they’re more likely to be scared off. It’s also a sign Google is going to take more steps to fight our rebellion - I did just find out the Pixel 11 will be getting Graphene so I was going to say that’s another Google attack but good news on that one, initially they thought it wasn’t going to be possible.
How’s Postmarket compare to Graphene? I went with Graphene because fewer development targets are usually a good thing for the end user, but that tablet end of support is closer than I’d like…
I mean, much of it meets all the criteria to be called malware, so it is “walking like a duck” and “quacking like a duck”.
All that bloat is typically cross-marketing agreements made with the makers of those apps to subsidize the phone’s cost without user consent. The part that I find weird is that there have been almost no marketing trials from major players testing the waters to see how much of a market there is for the same products that are not subsidized in this way, available at “full price”. Maybe they’re afraid that would draw too much attention to how atrocious the existing offerings are by comparison. It might put the privacy discussion more into the public discourse, which could be bad for their “business model”.
Yeah, agreed. My suspicion is that the major players have considered this and decided that the value of the customer data they gain from their bullshit malware apps is more than they would make by selling a clean phone, even at premium prices. I don’t know how the numbers break down, but I’m sure they do and they are probably right. Maybe most people would rather have a cheap phone full of tacky bullshit. It would be nice to have the choice tho!
