Vivaldi still has Google features like search and safebrowsing which report everything you type into the URL bar and every site you visit to Google by default. Simply "not packaged by Google" doesn't guarantee non-Google.

You can interact with SafeSearch in one of two ways: by sending a URL hash to Google, or by downloading the list of URLs and performing your checks locally.

As a replacement for Chrome on your PC, Brave takes the second approach, and performs the evaluation locally (pulling down a fresh list every so often for up-to-date comparisons). You'll have to check with Vivaldi on which approach they take.

Brave has all of the phone-home-to-Google logic removed. If you ever spot anything at all that gives you concern, do feel free to let us know.

Sampson (Brave Developer Relations)

I just spotted something after updating Brave this evening. Included in the update was the version bump to Chromium 69 - and when I re-launched Brave, there was a popup saying "Here are the new features in Chrome 69", and clicking on it took me to a Google-hosted page listing all the ways in which Chrome 69 phones home for a safer, faster, more convenient browsing experience.

After having just posted here, it was...disconcerting. I'd like to give you guys the benefit of the doubt, but you may want to check a fresh update & relaunch from 0.23 to 0.24. I doubt I could reproduce (I've already clicked past it, and it was only on the first re-launch), but for a moment I was pretty confused about what browser was open (in fact, the only reason I'm certain it's Brave is because I just double-checked my Chrome and it's still on 0.68). Brave 0.24, V8 6.9.427.23, rev f657f15, macOS x64 (10.11.6 El Capitan), OS Release 15.6.0, Brave Sync v1.4.2, libchromiumcontent 69.0.3497.100.