Hello all! I’ve been making the switch from American to European tech, and was wondering your thoughts on Vivaldi browser and Qwant search engine.
Vivaldi is based on Chromium and iirc not fully open source, but is still suggested in European tech spaces, and has a pretty good privacy policy.
Qwant is not open source, though claims to not to sell personal data or store searches.
What are your thoughts and perhaps suggestions for alternatives?
As you’ve pointed out, Vivaldi is based on Chromium so you are still indirectly supporting Google’s browser monopoly.
Qwant is a decent search engine but they share certain information, including IP’s, with uptream search providers such as Microslop and Google. I do believe they have a partnership with Ecosia to develop their own joint search engine/crawler but until then they both rely on Bing and Google and have to share information as per agreement terms. As always, check privacy and ToS agreements for full details.
Search engines are kind of in shit place right now with so many being either A: American, or B: relying on Bing or Google (secret third option: both A and B). As for browsers, Firefox is also in a shit place right now but there are numerous excellent forks that strip out all of Mozilla’s stupid stuff. Waterfox, Librewolf, just to name a couple.