I'm running Chromium with HTTPS everywhere, uBlock Origin, Wappalyzer (curiosity purpose) & Bitwarden (password manager). It's the best setup I found regarding performances & energy consumption for my GNU/Linux laptops.
> Some features of Chromium use Google APIs, and to access those APIs, either an API Key or a set of OAuth 2.0 tokens is required. Setting up API keys is optional. If you don't do it, the specific APIs using Google services won't work in your custom build, but all other features will run normally.
From experience, running without API key means that the browser will nag you at every start. If it doesn't, you do have them and then the browser uses APIs mentioned on the page.
This was one of the more egregious ones from a few years ago; since fixed, but as far as I'm concerned the trust was permanently broken (what's to stop them from doing something similar and hiding it better, after all this made it past the package maintainer until a user complained).
By the way, I think this comment [0] sums it up well for many HN folks:
> As a web developer, I like chrome. As a private person, I uninstalled it. You might call it a feature or a core extension, most people consider this spyware.
Stuff like my browser fingerprint, what extensions am I using, what website am I browsing, what operating system am I running, what is my location, etc.
It's not about conspiracy theories, just acknowledging that we don't know what's happening under the hood.
And how is this related to Vivaldi in particular? How is it different from any other software and service out there? You don't know what websites do with your client data (fingerprint, extensions, etc), what cookies they write & read and who are they selling that data to. If there are no laws preventing them from doing such BS, all you can do is trust, believe and hope they do the right thing (GDPR is a move in the right direction here). Having a basic understanding of the internet and tracking helps, using proper tools to help yourself is even better (cookie manager, uMatrix, uBlock and alike).
> You don't know what websites do with your client data (fingerprint, extensions, etc), what cookies they write & read and who are they selling that data to.
You can take actions within the browser and on your network to mitigate what websites can and can't do with your data. However, if your browser itself is compromised and closed source, there's nothing you can do about it and you can't even be sure what data is being extracted and used.
That's a deflection and avoiding an answer. You say that you do not know what is happening under the hood. There's a published archive of program source code to read. So what is stopping you from reading it and finding out what the program does under the hood? Difficulty with tar? Or with xz?
