Yet another reason to stop using Chrome: Gemini is coming right into the browser, including the address bar ("Omni bar") by default. These features are computationally expensive at scale, privacy-destroying, and just plain annoying.
https://blog.google/products/chrome/chrome-reimagined-with-ai/
@eruwero Us software developers need to eat. Free software doesn't bring enough for us all.
@lettosprey @mttaggart you can monetize free (as in freedom, not price) software too though. You could charge for the software itself or for support or make it easy for people to donate. But I agree it's not easy because big tech can offer things for free since the make the money with surveillance, not software.
@Vivaldi is also free as in free beer, so what's the financial incentive other than being able to sneak in surveillance software to sell data and/or push ads without consent?
@eruwero
I am very pro-FOSS; but I do not like the "it has to be FOSS!" mindset many have. The important bits is that the software follows open standards, and that you can trust it.
Vivaldi dragging Temu in broke my trust.
The difference between Vivaldi free and Firefox / Librewolf-free is that Vivaldi owns the code, and all the work they put into it belong to them, while Firefox/Librewolf, anyone can take the source, and make it their product (as long as changes are contributed back)
The latter is a tricky thing to build a business on.
Now, if everyone that could, decided to put €)10+ a month towards FOSS projects, the world would be quite different.
Free software saves me a LOT of money, so I put some of that back into sponsoring. I was even going to give some to Vivaldi, but, well, Temu got in the way.
@mttaggart @Vivaldi
@lettosprey
I get your point. I don't really trust it if it's not free software, there are just too many ways it can go wrong, even if the developers seem trustworthy right now.
Regarding the difference between Vivaldi and Firefox/Librewolf: This is also a trust issue though, right? If a company/non-profit/large community supports something there are more reasons to trust it and one could build a business around that trust IMO. The code could still respect users freedom
@lettosprey
I wanted to give an example of how free software can also make money and looked at the mozilla corporation (not that that's a perfect model or anything), but of the $653 million in revenue (2023) $555 million come from google. That's crazy. This surveillance crap needs to be stopped.
@lettosprey
anyway the positive thing is that there can be better alternatives like Librewolf because Firefox is (apart from trademark stuff) free software. If Vivaldi were too and they do stuff like the Temu bookmarks you mentioned no one would have to take that crap and they could instead make their own version without it. This #enshittification no one wants seems to be the only real reason for nonfree software
Taggart
eruwero
Lett Osprey 
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