4
About Vivaldi Community | Vivaldi Community
(vivaldi.net)
A community for Vivaldi - the private, customizable and powerful browser.
Chromium but with extra steps. Why did vivaldi choose chromium.
Because Blink is the best engine. Chromium, same as any other engine, is FOSS, therefore everyone, if want, can gutt out the Google crap it has by default, what the Vivaldi devs do very well in every update, leaving some Google APIs as options in the settings. If you desactivate eg the one of the Chrome Store, Vivaldi can't download extensions from there, because it isn't seen not longer as a Chromium. Vivaldi isn't a simple chromium fork, pasting just the own logo, there is a lot of work behind every new release.
To be fair it is just a Chromium backend with their custom frontend. And the value Vivaldi brings is in that frontend hence it's being proprietary.
Jón von Tetzchner mentioned they been talking internally about making it open source, but it's very unlikely.
It would be interesting if they made it fully open source. I hope they do, but fully understand if they don't.