Vivaldi integrates Proton VPN for enhanced browsing privacy
Vivaldi Technologies has announced a partnership with Proton AG to integrate Proton VPN directly into the Vivaldi web browser. This collaboration aims to enhance user privacy by providing built-in virtual private network (VPN) capabilities without the need for additional software installations.
The integration introduces the free version of Proton VPN into Vivaldi's desktop browser. Users can access this feature by logging into their Vivaldi account, which then enables private browsing through Proton VPN's secure servers. The free service allows connections to servers in five randomly selected countries and offers moderate browsing speeds. For users seeking enhanced performance and a broader selection of server locations, an upgrade to Proton VPN's premium service is available at $10 per month, granting access to servers in over 110 countries with faster speeds.
Both Vivaldi and Proton are European companies committed to providing independent and privacy-focused technological solutions. Vivaldi CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner emphasized the importance of European alternatives in the tech industry, highlighting the increasing demand for services that operate outside the influence of major tech giants. This partnership reflects their mutual dedication to user privacy and data protection.
Currently, the Proton VPN integration is available exclusively on the desktop version of the Vivaldi browser. Users can activate the VPN by logging into their Vivaldi account, which simplifies the process and removes the need for separate VPN applications or extensions. While there is no official confirmation regarding mobile integration, Vivaldi has indicated that future support for mobile platforms is under consideration.
The collaboration between Vivaldi and Proton represents a significant step towards enhancing online privacy for users, reinforcing the commitment of both companies to uphold user privacy in the digital age.
Source: Neowin
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“Vivaldi Technologies has announced a partnership with Proton AG to integrate Proton VPN directly into the Vivaldi web browser. This collaboration aims to enhance user privacy” […]
Why would I trust/use proprietary software (closed source) which the layman cannot audit and further trust this offering?
Go free/open source software or GTFO!
@bugs bunny: Proton VPN is open source.
@bugs bunny: Proton VPN is open source.
Imagine how ridiculous is to mention “EuRopEan” when von Tetzchner lives like a clown in USA and doesn’t leave, he loves Europe so much he is just another invader in USA land.
And also Protonmail, which was always the central service from Proton company, was created under CIA/NSA oversight by MIT by scientists who also worked at CERN, of course, lets’ not even mention how the a bunch of Chinese names appear as the scientists behind cryptography and computer science, so European.
Of course, it’s been so long that people will say “it doesn’t matter” and they just buy the fantasy that they can achieve a lot of privacy by paying 912839 services in today’s internet where even your refrigerator needs internet access……
Now, Vivaldi promotes the most ridiculous sense of privacy. First, they make you put your phone number as a requirement to use their email service, which already requires you to input a recovery email, which means two ways of identify you right in the Vivaldi account. (I hope that’s not the case for the VPN of course.)
They force auto-join you to their forums service if you accidentally open their forums and you are logged in your Vivaldi account, which means anyone can easily find you and right away have your vivaldi email to spam you.
They don’t proxy any connections to google servers, so any components, safe browsing and all that, are being able to be tracked by Google.
They still ‘ping’ to their servers with no way to opt out unless you do it yourself outside the browser. It has an unique ID… so yeah, not very private if they can easily identify you.
They use Bing as a partner, and as partners they are forced to whitelist Bing, so the adblocker has by default a list with partners included Bing to allow their trackers. Of course, they would rather get money through this with Bing, than just go independent and find a way to make money without Bing. Hypocrisy to their max.
Plus by default their adblocker is not even turned on, so you are not being protected if you skip their wizard and don’t turn the adblocker on.
They based their Adblocker in ABP, which is not good, but it is not bad, it just has less Scriptlets/Snippets than uBlock or Adguard, so you can’t do much against some scripts that some websites use because of it… the problem with this is that they didn’t spend time to improve the adblocker, hire someone that will make compatibility rules for Vivaldi, add Procedural Cosmetics and other missing rules, but somehow they had the time to add a special rule to allow the partners like Bing to count as a way for their getting money through the partnership as a rule in the adblocker and not just the usual whitelist of the connection as before, so they wasted time doing the same they were doing before but as an adblocker rule, which is, whitelist Bing and their other partners.
You can see it in their partners list as “$ad-attribution-tracker” and “$attribute-ads” and “$ad-query-trigger” syntax. So I guess improving the adblocker, outside what ABP offers and have Procedurals is not important compared to allow the same companies track you but pretend it is a better alternative because you don’t allow ALL their trackers… just some, and this is not only about Bing, it is even googletagmanager is there, and a bunch of google analytics.
You can disable the list, yes, but it is turned on by default, so yeah… that’s my point, it’s dumb to pretend you care about privacy when they are clearly care more about money from US companies like Bing and using the “EuRopEan” crap, like if European countries are not caught often spying on people, social media, arresting people for what they say online, and always fighting to end ‘encryptions’ and all that.
people love talking too much about the new world and what happens in USA, but I don’t even see that happening in USA, or not as weird as in Europe.
So it seems another useless attempt by Vivaldi to pretend they are better than the others while not being better than the others. For example, Vivaldi is still close source, they are still using a terrible web technologies for their UI, which means while they might have tons of features and customization, you are at the mercy of how slow it is moving windows and using their features together, like tab stacks, split view and workgroups.
So they would rather not spend money and rework their UI to use a real programming language that will not suffer any performance issues, and just hire the cheapest developers (web) because doing CSS and JS is so easy and that they can pour a bunch of features even if they brick the browser if you use them simultaneity.
Their sync is not even working properly anymore, so you will have tons of sync errors even after they spent like two weeks with issues on their servers, but yeah, the same guy that works with the adblocker, works with the sync… they of course said that their adblocker is fine and all that, but without a filter list maintainer that works with Vivaldi limitations, it will never be good enough, even if it achieves 1:1 parity with ABP. (you don’t need to do everything ABP does, you can implement your own stuff… well they did it for the ad tracking stuff, they could do it for porting scriptlets from uBlock and all that)
People might complain about MV3 but at least thanks to MV3 there is better adblocking in Vivaldi’s sidebar, because it works there unlike MV2 extensions. SO those are good news, you can turn Vivaldi adblockers off, use Adguard (which has their own limitations, like not using native :has() for their cosmetics, which causes issues even if they just should insert some CSSStylesheet with the :has() rules… which means Adguard is being lazy, but at least Adguard supports custom rules, unlike uBlock lite because gorhill is being weird as usual). So not everything is a negative in using Vivaldi with the future MV3 adblocking extensions.
So yeah… always the same propaganda of ‘privacy’ which is a laughable subject at this point, especially when everyone has a phone in their pockets, is connected to internet 24/7 (not just the phone obviously) and the dumb AI being promoted as the last salvation for humanity to even ask the AI “can I die if I don’t breath?” or some IQ question like that… so people are promoting worst technologies that are going to be used to destroy more and more privacy, so the scheme of saying “privacy” to everything, seems ridiculous when you check obvious facts like how Vivaldi runs their browser.
Excellent thank you so much for your reply I learned a lot.
@txtim: you say you learned a lot, and that includes nonsense too. Such as:
* they make you put your phone number as a requirement to use their email service
* They force auto-join you to their forums service if you accidentally open their forums and you are logged in your Vivaldi account
* by default their adblocker is not even turned on, so you are not being protected if you skip their wizard and don’t turn the adblocker on – sure, if you ignore the Settings page, but Vivaldi is not for those kinds of users
* They based their Adblocker in ABP, which is not good, but it is not bad, it just has less Scriptlets/Snippets than uBlock or Adguard – Vivaldi is about choice, so if ABP is not good enough for you, install e.g. AdGuard, what is the problem with that?
* Their sync is not even working properly anymore – works fine for me, so “not working properly” is just 1 person’s opinion. And what is that based on?
In other words, think about salt.
> a significant step towards enhancing online privacy for users
Yeah
> by logging into their Vivaldi account
Ha-ha-ha…
@Cap.O.: so?