Anthropyevery time I see someone going "I finally ditched #firefox and went with this closed source chromium based alternative instead"
all I can think of is
Oblomov@anthropy that's literally the only reason why I haven't switched over. I used to be an Opera aficionado when it was its own browser with its own rendering engine, and now I would *love* to switch to Vivaldi for many of the same reasons why I used to love Opera, but its reliance on Blink is a killer 8-(
Matt@oblomov @anthropy I used to work at Opera 
when it had its own rendering engine (and for a bit post-blink), so know a lot of the people making Vivaldi 
Right now, I would much rather put my trust in the group of people that I know, making that product in Norway 🇳🇴 and Iceland 🇮🇸, that keep making good decisions about their product, than in the Silicon Valley strangers at Mozilla the USA 🇺🇸 that keep making terrible decisions.
🤷
It's a me, Mauro@matt @mauro @anthropy the problem is that they can only listen to customer feedback for UI/UX comments, not concerning what defines the world wide web, which is way more important.
For example, they cannot support JPEG-XL that Google decided to drop https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/85153/adding-support-for-jpeg-xl-jxl-images/15
When Google will finalize dropping support for XSLT, Vivaldi will have to follow suit https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/google-killing-open-web/
Similarly, it won't be able to support the Gemini protocol or the Gemtext format.
Chromium is open-source and there are tickets in the public bug tracker which Vivaldi staff are cc'd in on - so I would presume there is some collaboration happening.
Vivaldi *could* dedicate resources to either improving the existing code for Chromium or legally fork Chromium and develop their own version based on it.
Until then, Chromium is used by many other browsers that there's an industry-wide interest in keeping it up to date compared to Gecko.
@matt @oblomov @anthropy I'd say chromium is "open-source", since it's maintained by google devs that can decide on any external contribution wether to accept it or not.
I believe that any browser that is using chromium is doing a huge disservice to the open web, definitely not helping the cause.
Vivaldi is great at marketing to the right audience. That's it.
People seem to lament the Presto days and whilst I really loved Opera, it was all proprietary software.
Chromium is open source and maintained by Google devs. But - correct me if I am wrong - Gecko is open source and maintained by Mozilla devs. Both companies are making shitty decisions.
It just feels like a lose-lose to me but I can understand why a new browser (2015 is new, right?) would choose Chromium over Gecko. 🤷
Proprietary software is less of an issue for the health of an ecosystem than a monoculture. Opera/Presto was a net positive for the health of the web because it was an independent implementation of the W3C standards. Google's control of the WHATWG via Chromium and the controlled opposition of Gecko is catastrophic: the Blink code being open source is completely irrelevant when whatever Google decides (and nothing else) goes.