Despite being Chromium-based, Vivaldi browser promises to preserve effective ad-blocking as a choice

Vivaldi browser calls itself the browser that puts you in control, and as such the company is pretty miffed about Google’s plans to deprecate the WebRequest API, the engine behind many ad-blocking applications.

Vivaldi is Chromium-based, and like other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and the new Edge, Google’s decision will have effects way beyond Chrome.

They observe:

Ad blockers as a choice

This decision by Google goes to the heart of how we use the web today. On the one hand, there’s Google who track us, serve us ads and monetize on us (to fit their business model). On the other – the users who want to get away from the intrusiveness, the profiling and the excessive load times ads can cause.

The company has now vowed to preserve the choice of users to block ads if they desire, even if it means they have to backport the functionality to the Chromium rendering engine.

They write:

As Vivaldi is built on the Chromium code, how we tackle the API change depends on how Google implements the restriction. A new version of the Chromium code comes every six weeks, and it has to be integrated with Vivaldi’s own code.

Once the change is introduced to Chromium, believe me when I say that there are many, many possible scenarios.

Restoring the API could be one of them. We’ve restored functionality before.

If the API is removed altogether and no decent alternative is implemented, we might look into creating a limited extensions store.

For the time being, Google’s implementation is not final and will likely change. It’s also possible the alternative API will eventually cover the use cases of the webRequest API.

The good news is that whatever restrictions Google adds, at the end we can remove them. Our mission will always be to ensure that you have the choice.

See more about the browser’s features in their video below:

If you wish to support the company you can download their browser here.

Via Techdows