It's better than nothing but it's still far behind uBlock Origin or even the Brave's built-in ad blocker. Their decision to stop supporting uBlock Origin made me drop it as my alternative browser.

Just checked it, and uBlock Origin still works in the latest version (as well as uMatrix and some other Mv2 extensions I had installed)

I literally downloaded the latest version yesterday (8.3), and uBlock Origin, uMatrix (and some other niche MV2 extensions) still work. I just have to update them manually since Google removed them from the store, but other than that, they work as before

I have a question. My ISP, allegedly, knows what websites I go to. So why can't I pay my ISP an optional $20 a month that gets evenly distributed directly to those websites, in exchange for an ad-free web experience?

Surely I'm not creating much more than $20 in ad revenue in total per month, right? Can't we just cut out the middleman and all walk away happy?

How many websites do you go to a month? Hundreds? Thousands? And you want the ISP to handle the payment processing out to them? Many probably international? And each ISP doing this on their own?

Sure, why not? They're billion dollar corporations, they can handle some basic payment processing. If it creates a genuinely better user experience, it will increase customer loyalty and make them money in the long run.

I'd rather my ISP and ad networks have harsh criminal penalties with prison time for management, engineers, and everyone else involved for tracking what sites I visit. That would be a genuinely better experience.

I mean, I obviously agree...but time and time again, consumers keep showing that they're willing to give up privacy for a bit of convenience. Might as well use that to make the web a better place.

Spotify figured it out.

Well, your ISP likely _doesn't_ know which sites you are going to.

In the old days, they'd run proxies, but with SSL, they no longer know where they are going, only that they are, for example, going to an AWS or GCP site.

SSL (and most DNS queries) expose the hostname

Unless ECH and DoH are enabled, which I believe has been the default on Chrome and Firefox for a few years now.

ECH rollout is limited. But hopefully one day.

Speaking as someone who managed to get uncle Murdoch to sponsor writing an adblocker/payment tool similar to yours (while I was working at an adtech business), but then got stalled by the publishers (who on avg. hated ads), specifically the direct supply sales people (who tend to have louder voices in those companies, have mortgages to pay) -- the issue is systemic.

ISPs are already selling your data to a bunch of data brokers, I don't think ad spend is the only goal there.

People have been trying stuff like this for almost 20 years now.

The core problem is that while people hold up that ads are the problem, the actual problem is that people like free stuff with no strings attached, i.e. have your cake (the content) and eat it too (nothing traded for it).

So when you present people an alternate way to compensate creators directly, they overwhelmingly just stick with ad blocking. There is a long case file of fools taking the internet at their word that "I want to give but the ads are so bad I can't!". They don't want to give lol

I don't think that's the case. I think the problem is that the sort of market behavior that would drive a company to run invasive ads in the first place betrays its fundamental lack of respect for its users. I want to pay for stuff. And I have tried. Even in doing so, I've found piracy is still often the superior service to using what I'm actually paying for.

Exactly. I'm not opposed to paying a few bucks a month to a website I visit a lot, but that adds up. At some point a "Netflix for Adblocking" starts to make sense.

> free stuff with no strings attached

I'm aware I'm preaching to the choir here on HN, but boy are there strings...

The problem is that the choice isn't seeing ads v.s. paying for the content. Instead, the choice is seeing ads v.s. overpaying for the content, then seeing ads anyway when the service decides to indrosuce ads back to the paid subscription. By overpaying, I mean compared to what the service itself values it content at when it serves it for free with ads.

How many people would sign up for a 15$ per month subscription to read one article with no ads? How many would pay 1¢ once to read the article with no ads? How many would sign up for one 15$ per month subscription to see no ads anywhere?

ISPs have their own DNS servers they could use to those block ads, ie. a network-wide Pihole. Paying the Spotify for Adblock fee could get you access to the "premium" DNS servers.

It would still be an arms race, but I'm just spitballing here.

The problem is I don't want surveillance and I don't want to incentivize trying to distract me (the "attention economy"). "Creators" just don't want to acknowledge that much of their "content" has zero or negative value to most people, and instead claim that everyone just wants free stuff. No, I want most of these "creators" to stop creating.

Longer. Microtransactions online dates back to DigiCash[1], founded in 1989 and with their first issue online of "CyberCash" in 1994 - I remember testing it at university briefly. When microtransactions quickly started turning out to be cumbersome on an individual basis that quickly made some people pivot to the idea of bundling on the user side and have the system pay it out with microtransactions on the publisher side...

I agree with the caveats you outline, though. I think to work, something like this would need to be a box you'd tick when signing up for your ISP that promised some "ad free premium access to [X number] of sites" or similar, and you'd trade entirely on it being big name sites. Even then I'd expect relatively limited takeup mostly from people unaware of ad blockers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash

Calculating shares is basically impossible from DNS records and easily abusable.

That is basically the whole premise of the Brave browser though.

I'm not sure why your ISP should be involved. Ideally they don't know what sites you're visiting. Your browser knows, though. And what you're describing is kind of what Brave tried to do with BAT (and kind of failed at).

This[1] claims the average American is worth about $1605/year in ad revenue. It's a model, so it's certainly possible it is significantly off. That said if there was a credible system like this, I'd happily pay for even the right partial offering.

[1] https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google

This reminds me I have to see what's up with my install. Tried running earlier and got a message that it's secure store is busted, and have options to switch profile or continue and lose data, and all profiles are similarly broken. Luckily I don't keep much in it beyond sites like GMail and anything else not very Firefox friendly. Hoping this doesn't mean I lose access to my Google account as it's only logged in there.

I had the same thing when I switched from Gnome to Niri. In the end I got it fixed somehow, but I don't remember the exact details.

It was about how the default keyring was called, and that the name of the keyring ia actually case sensitive.

I'm the kind of person who reinstalls linux to change distro and copies over my installation folder for my browser. A long time ago (back when it released in 2014/5) I would do this with windows too. Usually I would get to keep my browser perfectly intact, tabs and all.

That's harder on Linux, with Windows I usually had to only copy appdata for the user and everything would be flawless. I don't know exactly what's different with Linux Vivaldi installs, but it almost always breaks like this.

There are Singleton lock files in .config/vivaldi[-snapshot] that can be deleted if the profiles aren't protected by a keyring.

If the profiles are protected by either KWallet or Gnome-libsecret, you need to unlock that keyring before starting Vivaldi. If you moved to a KDE or Gnome desktop environment from something like Niri or Hyprland, or vice versa, this can happen.

With Vivaldi closed, back up ~/.config/vivaldi/ or ~/.config/vivaldi-snapshot, then try launching with the original backend:

vivaldi-stable --password-store=kwallet6

vivaldi-stable --password-store=kwallet5

vivaldi-stable --password-store=gnome-libsecret

vivaldi-stable --password-store=basic

(only if the original profile used it; not recommended for regular use) I had to do this when I went from Hyprland to KDE Plasma and KDE Wallet made it so I couldn't open Vivaldi when I logged into the Hyprland session.

For KWallet/libsecret, the original wallet must also be available and unlocked.

I’ve had a really good experience with Vivaldi as a replacement for the Arc browser.

It really is nice to have a browser from a company whose incentives seem to be for the actual users.

How does it hold up with many tabs opened VS chrome?

The tab management in Vivaldi is far superior to chrome. The number of options can be overwhelming, but once you get it the way you like it you'll never want to leave. Definitely give it a try.

Give Ardia a try, its the closest I've seen to get an Arc like experience from a fully open source browser. Some small bugs still but development is very active and fixes are coming rapidly.

To anyone that doesn't know: Vivaldi's code is partially closed source [0]. It's not much better than Google Chrome on that regard.

[0]: https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...

For those interested in a GPL-licensed browser from Norway:

https://nordstjernen.org/index.html

Is it just me or is it a bit sad that even GPL'd software has websites that are full of Claudisms these days?

Like have some pride when showing off your project. Write a few sentences. Why should I give a shit about your project when you don't even care enough to describe it in your own words?

Is that the case though?

The homepage mentions this:

"It ships no telemetry of any kind, and deliberately includes no AI assistant and no AI-style web APIs."

I am not sure the website is AI generated. Can you be more specific why you think this is the case?

replying to my own post to follow up:

It is apparently furtive slop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151418

If I don't remember bad its just the GUI part, anyway for me is fundamental in my workflow due to its usabillity and productivity improvements.

They say it's just the GUI.

Shame there's no way to check something else isn't included too.

Can't you just use Firefox instead of that disguised Chrome equipped with stuff you get from Firefox Addon page?

You can. You can also try out Ladybird or any of the Fx's forks.

I quit Firefox after a long ride because I got tired of slow loading times, and scrolling that I wasn't able to fix. No matter the settings it's still not as good as in Chrome.

Firefox is much worse in customizations in basics like keyboard and mouse controls

For me Vivaldi on Linux has a 50% probability of freezing whenever I use Ctrl+F and type some text I am looking for, requiring killing and restarting the process. It's been the case for years but I keep putting up with it because I can't live without side panels. No issues on Windows and MacOS.

HN hivemind, any ideas why?

I am using Gentoo Linux (no systemd) with XFCE (on X11, no Wayland).

In this environment, Vivaldi never freezes, regardless what you do.

So what you see is not related to Linux, but it is due to an interaction with something else that you use, perhaps Gnome, if you use it.

As a Libre Wolf user I feel like the battle against ads is a losing one, but I'm glad there are folks out there working on this.

I'm still on 8.0 for the time being since it's the last version that still supports MV2 extensions.

I wouldn't publicly admit to doing things like this. Willingly foregoing updates for internet-connected software (especially your web user agent) is considered harmful.

You could be using Firefox with MV2 extensions instead which would sound far less ridiculous than "I am using Vivaldi (Chromium) while refusing to (ever) update it"

I checked it, and 8.1, 8.2 and the latest 8.3 all support Mv2 extensions (tested with uBlock Origin, uMatrix and some other niche extensions I use). Don't know where you got the info about 8.0 being the last to support mv2, but it's clearly wrong :D

> Don't know where you got the info about 8.0 being the last to support mv2

I updated to whatever the next version was, and it disabled all my MV2 extensions (mainly uBO). I figured that they kept MV2 support going as long as they could, and there was recently a patch by Google that removed the support for good, so that must be the end of it. So I downgraded back.

Did you have to do anything to reenable MV2 extensions? Or maybe it was a just bug they fixed later?

This was true, temporarily with some snapshot builds, for whatever reason. At some point MV2 extensions started to work again. That said, I imagine there will be a point where keeping MV2 working would be untenable. I seem to remember reading something that indicated that that was why they were beefing up the internal ad-blocker.

Ok so I updated to 8.3 and indeed uBO still works, so it must've been a bug. Thanks for pointing this out.

clicking this reply from 8.3.4191.23 with MV2 and uBO working fine. Vivaldi added workaround ignoring Google code that removed needed APIs.

Is middle mouse button still broken in Vivaldi on linux?

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/102072/no-autoscroll-on-midd...

In that forum it says that you must edit the parameters of the command line with which Vivaldi is launched by your graphic desktop to get scrolling, if that is what you want.

I am pretty sure that the middle mouse button is not broken in Vivaldi on Linux.

It probably just has a different default behavior than what you expect, e.g. the middle button might have been allocated by default to mouse gestures, not to clipboard or scrolling or whatever you expect.

I am using Vivaldi, but I do not remember which was its default behavior, because I no longer use mice, but a stylus on a small graphic tablet, and I reconfigured Vivaldi for the buttons of my Wacom stylus.

In any case, if I had been using a mouse, I would have wanted to allocate the middle button to mouse gestures, because those are much more useful than the uses of the middle button for the X clipboard or for scrolling.

It's still broken btw.

For me, Vivaldi has 2 major advantages in comparison with Firefox and Chrome, which I also use.

One is that Vivaldi can be controlled with mouse gestures. Mouse gestures can provide a much more convenient user interface for most GUI programs (by avoiding to switch your hand between mouse and keyboard), but unfortunately very few programs have been using them.

The other is even more important for me. The Vivaldi command to print a Web page frequently functions correctly, i.e. what is rendered in the printed file is the same as what the browser renders on the computer display.

In contrast, both Firefox and Chrome almost never render correctly a printed Web page, even if they render it correctly on the display. In Firefox and Chrome the printed page is usually corrupted, with various graphic elements scaled and moved in a different way than on screen, so they overlap over each other.

How does this company make money? What's their market share?