As far as I understand it, it's paid placement for search engines and bookmarks [0], and potentially attaching aff links to some search results [1]. Isn't that pretty much the same model as Mozilla and Firefox? Kind of a far cry from being a data aggregator and an ad company, right?

[0]: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/20277/vivaldi-income/2 [1]: http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-software/29904/jon-von-tetzch...

I understand why they do it (people gotta eat), but to me that looks even less trustworthy than Mozilla, which at least has a certain entrenched culture that typically tries (not always successfully) to blunt the worst corporate decisions, and follows real opensource practices.

  We’ve always taken data security extremely seriously. And we’ve long believed that everything you store in your browser belongs to you — which is why we’ll never sell your data, or willingly compromise your privacy

From the (older) interview you linked: 'The aim is to earn a dollar per year per user. "We're almost there," he says. "I think we can do more than that and still be nice guys and not sell out our users or do anything silly."' That's hardly cast-iron, especially considering that Opera did indeed sell out eventually (yeah I know that "it was complicated", but that's basically what it boiled down to). But hey, in the end, trust is individual, so more power to them. I just think their impact on the web at large will never be as significant as Mozilla's, if they continue on this track.

Google is more than a browser manufacturer. Their business model is mostly ads. Things like Chrome feed back into that (collecting data on people and using it to personalize other experiences... like ads). How is Vivaldi's business model similar?

Sorry, I'm so oldschool that for me the two are still basically the same -- after all, blink was a webkit fork, which was a khtml fork.

> How is Vivaldi's business model similar?

See my other comment.

We encourage users to explore privacy-conscious options and educate themselves on the basics of web browser security. This year we integrated DuckDuckGo as our default Private Search, and added Qwant to the list of suggested search engines (which includes StartPage as well). All of these are great tools for taking back your privacy. We’re continuing to explore ways to protect Vivaldi users and this will always be a top priority."

Ignoring that Blink and Webkit are feature identical, what negative effects are there with an open source rendering engine monoculture?

Once the operating system is encased in amber, only a massive budget can break new ground -- this is why things like Plan 9 from Bell Labs will never take off. It's why Haiku is importing more and more BSD code instead of pursuing their own paradigms. It's why the only realistic chance for anything new is Google's Fuchsia; they're one of a very few organizations who can afford to innovate in this environment.

We are? Uhh ... not really?

We use FreeBSD's WiFi stack and drivers (same as the other BSDs), and have plans to import some of FreeBSD's work to get linuxdrm/gallium for hardware acceleration. That's it.