Vivaldi co-founder: advertisers 'stole the internet from us'

Readers like you help support XDA Developers. When you make a purchase using links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Smartphones are everywhere, and they give us so much access. We can find information instantly, buy products online for arrival within hours, and communicate through countless courier services. It's a double-edged sword, though, and being able to do all of this online means advertisers can learn your habits and follow you.

This is where Vivaldi comes in. It is a browser with a short but rich history. It was founded by former Opera CEO and co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Tatsuki Tomita and launched in 2016 as a way to cater to tech-savvy users and those who may not have been fans of the switch from Presto engine to Chromium in Operas. While Vivaldi also uses Chromium, heavy changes are made to the browser. It offers many ways to personalize your experience and, more importantly, a way to keep your browsing more private.

As you can imagine, Tetzchner has a lot of thoughts on the state of the internet in 2023, especially as it relates to advertising. XDA spoke to him at this year's Mobile World Congress, and it's clear to him that advertisers "stole the internet from us".

Compete with Big Tech as a small player

A big sticking point for Tetzchner is competing with the rest of Big Tech in an increasingly hostile space. He says companies like Google and Microsoft "see small businesses, and they see them as a threat", and that Vivaldi is part of a "small group of people who are actually in competition with these guys". He sees this as a sign that the company must be doing something right if others "see us and want to give us a hard time".

Tetzchner told me how sites from Google and Microsoft softly blocked the Vivaldi browser, as well as Opera, at the time. "You would log into something like Google Docs with Vivaldi, and it would tell you to switch browsers." He also mentioned that simply changing some of the user agent text would instantly cause the website to work again and that it was clear that Vivaldi was considered a threat.

For what it's worth, it seems likely that part of the problem companies like Google might have is that Vivaldi blocks a lot of tracking and bypasses ads in innovative ways. For example, Tetzchner said Vivaldi recently added the option on mobile for tabs to play audio in the background, and he specifically noted that it also works on YouTube. It's usually a YouTube Premium feature, but with Vivaldi you don't have to pay for it. Whether this is an ethical violation is up to you, but companies will naturally challenge this and try to protect their revenue streams, and sometimes this can be through unfair means.

Android's privacy sandbox doesn't change anything