Sometimes my social media feeds in Flipboard on my iPad bring serendipitous links to my attention, and that was the case early yesterday morning with this video from South Iceland from the Vivaldi web browser team.
I have not visited Iceland yet, but my buddy and podcasting partner, Jason Neiffer, has, and he’s raved about how much he loves the country, the geography, the culture, etc.
The purpose of this video by the Vivaldi Iceland Team is straightforward: Let more people know about the availability and benefits (especially regarding online PRIVACY) of the Vivaldi web browser… and simultaneously educate viewers about Vivaldi, its historic relationship to the Opera browser… and the good work their Norwegian and Icelandic teams are doing to support open web standards, competition in the world of web browsing, and a more private / protected online experience for users overall.
For me, this web video strategy worked! While I’d downloaded and tried Vivaldi at some point in the past, I hadn’t been using it recently. As a result of the video, I downloaded Vivaldi on my iPad, MacOS laptop, and iPhone… and have been finding it both LIGHTNING FAST and also great (so far) for ad blocking, including ads on YouTube!
When you launch the Vivaldi browser on any device, you can choose if you want to “Block Ads and Trackers” and your “preferred level of blocking.” I’ve chosen to block them all, acknowledging that “some sites may break.”
I was curious about whether Vivaldi is based on the Chromium project from Google, and it turns out it is. Not only is that confirmed via the English WikiPedia, it also was confirmed by Gemini 3’s responses to this prompt:
Please tell me the background of the Vivaldi web browser, which has the development team based in Iceland. Is this chromium based or is it based on gecko or some other browser engine? User search skills and especially find some interesting trivia items about Vivaldi. Make the case for why privacy first browsers like Vivaldi are important.
My favorite part of this Gemini answer was shared under the heading, “Why Privacy-First Browsers Matter.”
In the modern web, your browser is often the “gatekeeper” of your digital identity. Privacy-first browsers like Vivaldi are important for several reasons:
- Anti-Profiling: Mainstream browsers often track your history to build a “shadow profile” of your interests, which is then sold to advertisers. Vivaldi does not collect your browsing data.
- Security by Default: By including built-in ad and tracker blockers, these browsers stop malicious scripts before they even load, reducing the “attack surface” of your computer.
- Encrypted Sync: When you sync your tabs or passwords across devices in Vivaldi, the data is end-to-end encrypted using a password that only you know. Not even the Vivaldi team can see your data.
- Breaking Monopolies: Using independent browsers prevents a single company (like Google) from dictating the “rules” of the internet, ensuring the web remains an open platform rather than a walled garden.
As a current middle school classroom teacher and media literacy advocate, I believe the importance of PRIVACY is poorly understood by many students as well as adults. Privacy is really the foundation of all other rights, and in our attention economy as well as maturing surveillance state, it’s important that we take actions to understand privacy better, protect our own privacy more, and help educate others about these issues and options.
I’m excited to rediscover the Vivaldi web browser and especially how FAST it is. I’ve been a big fan of Google for years (even before our Google Teacher Academy in Boulder, Colorado in 2009) but I’m also a supporter of the open web and privacy. So now that I’ve set Vivaldi to be my default web browser, we’ll see how that experience goes in upcoming weeks.
I encourage you to download Vivaldi and give it a try too! In our era of AI-embedded web browsers (like “AskGPT” from OpenAI) we need to critically interrogate the benefits and drawbacks of using digital tools which favor a panopticon approach to privacy.
Please let me know your thoughts and about your experiences about Vivaldi and Chrome-alternative web browsers, either here as a comment or via Mastodon, BlueSky, or other social media platforms.