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?
I used Qwant years ago, but don’t remember why I stopped. Maybe they introduced ads like Google, or something more annoying. But it’s not 100% european, they use Google and Bing engines (just like most private search engines) to show you results. Also, there are some articles talking about how sketchy it really is (French government public funding, links with Chinese companies, and more).
About Vivaldi, it depends on your devices. In my experience, Vivaldi for Android works fine on weak hardware, faster than Brave and Firefox, but slower than Chrome. Using it on PC always was a headache, it’s the worst optimized browser I’ve used. They care more about productivity features than performance or privacy. It can feel bloated.
I understand your concerns about headquarters and privacy. I think the strongest european options for browsing and searching are Vivaldi and Qwant, but remember to try them before switching.