Goodbye Firefox

For some time, I have been sad about the direction my long-time favorite browser has been going.

Last year, they started updating their terms of service to give them more ownership over user data. They quickly revised it again, but I sadly lost a piece of trust for the Mozilla Foundation.

Later in the year, their newly appointed CEO announced that "Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."

Aka.: more of the stuff the user base broadly doesn't want. At least not me.

AI has once again been the big hype in 2025, while I have grown more critical and tired of hearing about it. I am very, very worried about the climate impact of all of the new AI datacenters popping up. Hearing stories of areas aroudn the datacenters, totally drained of water.

infinite money glitch

Anyways, I don't want AI in my browser, neither to use or to train on my data, so I decided to look for a new one.

First thought was Librewolf, but I also stumbled upon Vivaldi: a Norway/Iceland based company, with a seemingly good, privacy-focused mission, built in tools to work with Proton, which I use for email, drive, VPN and calendar and a pledge to never implement AI features.

My only worry was that it is Chromium-based, but after reading their blogpost regarding this, I feel much better about my choice.

I will write a review later when I have used Vivaldi more.