this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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vivaldi probably does have spyware it lol. why would you choose an application that hides their code instead of making it open for everybody to see / improove? you dont need to be a programmer to know that any FOSS app with a following would get caught out instantly for pulling anything lame. Eg chromium prototyping web integrity api. you dont need to audit the code, just the fact that it is open makes it 99% more trustworthy as people are looking at the code all the time.
Vivaldi is Source Available :
https://vivaldi.com/source/
from vivialdi website: Roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open source coming from Chromium, 3% is open source coming from us, leaves only 5% for our UI closed-source
still way more sus than brave
source: https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/
Chromium has tons of eyes on it, because it's codebase for many other projects, such as Electron and any chromium based browser.
Web integrity wasn't discovered through chromium source code, but it was openly proposed by Google on separate Github repo, dedicated solely for that proposal.
There are many shortcuts in your thinking that just the code being open makes it trustworthy. Every PowerShell malware technically has its code open, because it's a script. But you wouldn't open a random script from the internet, without checking what it does, yet you don't apply the same logic to Brave. If you don't check the source code yourself, you either need to trust an author, or third parties that "checked" the code.
In addition to that, you're probably using compiled binary, which means at this point you can throw that source code out from window, because at this point you can't be sure compiled binary == source code.
Due to the enormous amount of code, it's really easy to obfuscate malicious behavior. At the scale of the browser it's more efficient tracking outbound packets that program sends than examine source code.
i really dont think the large amount of code thing is a good argument because of the way github works. any changes made are highlighted and you can look back at the history of changes. even if this theoretical spyware was implimented from the beginning people would know.
yeah I downloaded it from github and doubt its got spyware in it so i trust i dont need to compile it myself.
ppl are just hating coz they dont like some guy that has somthing to do with brave & all this brave is spyware stuff is based off of nothing.
vivaldi has closed source code that is completely trust me bro not spyware 🤣