Mastodawn

Bruce Lawson ✅ (quiet time)5d ago

"LLMs are essentially confident-sounding lying machines with a penchant to occasionally disclose private data or plagiarise existing work. While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we’ve seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies.

As such, it does not feel right to bundle any such solution into Vivaldi. There is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile." https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you/

Why Vivaldi browser won’t follow the current AI trend?

Web browsers are integrating the current AI trend with Large Language Model (LLM) functionality. But there are fundamental issues with it. We address them.

Vivaldi Browser

For more of my nuanced opinions about "A.I.", here's a clip from my talk at last month's @cssday.nl https://youtu.be/eMeVq8rd8ow?si=rKr50jVIVY5_ASzm

AI

YouTube

VulcanTourist 5d ago

@brucelawson

> Conservatives are essentially confident-sounding lying machines...

FTFY.

Lea Rosema 4d ago

@brucelawson instant install 💜

tootbrute 4d ago

@brucelawson hmm sounds like a sane browser

ZeStig

@brucelawson true. Hate the fact that it's proprietary though. @zenbrowser offers a way to disable LLMs.

@zstg How?

ZeStig

@brucelawson GitHub.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/6244

github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/6244#issuecomment-2722565915

Disable AI chat stuff by default by noaione · Pull Request #6244 · zen-browser/desktop

Fix #6236

GitHub

@zstg Ah, yes, that's the Orbit AI that Firefox added - they've just turned that off. (I misunderstood; I thought you meant *all* LLMs, not just the one Mozilla decided all its customers should have)

Jared White (🏳️‍⚧️ ally)5d ago

@brucelawson have you seen some of the latest research? Consumers are actively suspicious of products that try to jam the barf bots in there. I really think Vivaldi can position itself as the best option not doing that! 😆

Krzysztof Hankiewicz (he/him)5d ago

@jaredwhite @brucelawson Can you point me to this research? I'd love to add it to my anti-LLM collection 😄

Jared White (🏳️‍⚧️ ally)5d ago

@kjhank @brucelawson Here you go!

https://futurism.com/customers-see-ai-research

Something Hilarious Happens When Potential Customers See That a Product Has AI Features

New research explores how customers react to products that are marketed as having AI — with striking results.

Futurism

Krzysztof Hankiewicz (he/him)4d ago

@jaredwhite @brucelawson Awesome, thanks!

@kjhank @jaredwhite Also https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyvm1dyp9v2o

'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'

Businesses that rush to use AI to write content or computer code, often have to pay humans to fix it.

BBC News

@kjhank @jaredwhite Also https://theconversation.com/knowing-less-about-ai-makes-people-more-open-to-having-it-in-their-lives-new-research-247372 and https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2025/news-audience-feelings-artificial-intelligence-data/

Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives – new research

People with less AI literacy often see the technology as ‘magical’ and awe-inspiring.

The Conversation

loading… HAC (he/him)5d ago

@brucelawson my only wish list for @Vivaldi is to help foster an alternative to Chromium. 🙏🤞

Бин Баш 4d ago

@brucelawson Isn't Vivaldi just Chrome in a trenchcoat?

Fionor 4d ago

@binbash @brucelawson Yes and No.
It's build on chromium (which is like saying The house was build with bricks.) which is a core to basically every browser (and those who are different in that regard really suck - including Firefox).

The layers on top of chromium are what counts. And Vivaldi did really good job in focusing on consumer protection.

Fionor 4d ago

@binbash @brucelawson To be clear - reason why Firefox sucks isn't that much about browser - it's Mozilla Foundation that proved to be as bad as Google with surveillance and selling users data.

Jer 4d ago

@fionor
One thing people don't realize is that there's a lot of "Chromium libraries" even in browsers that don't use Chromium as their rendering engine. (Which is basically Firefox lol.)

@binbash @brucelawson

Jer 4d ago

@fionor
One thing people don't realize is that there's a lot of "Chromium libraries" even in browsers that don't use Chromium as their rendering engine.

(Which is basically Firefox lol.)

@binbash @brucelawson

Post by Jer, @nyquildotorg@gts.nyquil.org

> "Off the top of my head, Safari and Firefox use the following Chromium libraries: libwebrtc, libbrotli, libvpx, libwebp, some color management libraries, libjxl (Chromium may eventually contribute a Rust JPEG-XL implementation to Firefox; it’s a hard image format to implement!), much of Saf...

gts.nyquil.org

@binbash Nope; it's Chromium, with our own additions such as fully-customisable UI, tracker and ad blocker, on-device mail client, calendar, feed reader etc

Бин Баш 4d ago

@brucelawson I used Vivaldi in the past and was impressed by all the features. If it is based on chromium can it run things like uBlock in the future?

@binbash If you mean will it prolong the life of Manifest v2 extensions? No, not after Chromium removes the code. But we're working to make our own built-in blocker (which doesn't depend on Chromium's code) more powerful.

missingno 3d ago

@binbash In a way that Cyberpunk 2077 is just The Witcher 3 in a trenchcoat because they both use REDengine.

Rob 4d ago

@brucelawson

I prefer Vivaldi because of its customization, world class favorites/link syncing, beautiful design, best in class notes, tasks, and calendar integration.

My favorite features are the desktop on the new tab (which is open on my desktop much of the day) and the favorites bar which open links with one click. Many browsers strive to be the 'OS of the web', but only Vivaldi truly achieves that in my opinion.

Privacy, features, convenience.

chfkch

@brucelawson
If it was open source i would consider it. Loved it back then, i think almost 20 years ago?

@chfkch This is our 10th anniversary, so that wasn't us!

chfkch

@brucelawson
That's 1 letter apart 😁

Kuo 4d ago

@brucelawson

Nothing against VivLDI BUT

In the pic I see bing search, that negates any attempts to stop ai the browser makes and delivers very poor results.

@lohankuo Currently the default search is Startpage - but, of course, users can set it to whatever they want.

François @Prague 4d ago

@brucelawson I moved from Firefox to Vivaldi thanks to JD Vance and I am very happy. The only drawback I found so far is that Vivaldi does not read .mp4 videos encoded with H265 HVEC.

Thank you JD!

Zaphod42 3d ago

@brucelawson Tried this and get headache. The Setup of the desktop version asks for a E-Mail-Adress to synchronise and did not configurate this. It offers Import from other browsers, gives only a "skip" button. Then i have to look a lot of video and tutorials.

Configuration of sync is stressfull, finding a usable username a thread.

In the Android version i can't customize search, there is no possibillity to configure my custom local searchXNG. So this is not usable for me.

Bruce Lawson ✅ (quiet time)3d ago

@Zaphod42 thanks for feedback, have taken this to Android team