Vivaldi is taking a clear swing at the browser industry’s new obsession: while Chrome, Edge, and the rest pile on AI features, the company says it wants to keep browsing human. Co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner is betting that plenty of users feel the same way, and he says the browser is already seeing new interest from people turned off by the AI arms race.
That’s a useful bit of positioning in a crowded browser market. If the biggest players keep turning browsers into assistant platforms, privacy-first alternatives get an easy contrast point – and Vivaldi appears happy to make that contrast loud and obvious.
Vivaldi’s anti-AI pitch
Von Tetzchner says Vivaldi users are not begging for AI widgets, with responses to the idea mostly ranging from ”no” to ”absolutely not.” He frames the browser’s job as helping people organize and control the web, not stuffing another layer of automation between the user and the page.
He also argues that competitors are bolting on tools that many users did not ask for. In his view, that includes Brave, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, all of which are moving toward more AI-centric features whether users want them or not.
Tabs, workspaces and a different kind of productivity
Vivaldi’s answer to AI tab management is basically: it already has tab management. The browser leans on stacked tabs, tiled tabs, and workspaces instead of machine-generated sorting, which is a refreshingly old-school response in a category getting increasingly enchanted with automation.
- Stacked tabs for grouping related pages
- Tiled tabs for side-by-side layouts
- Workspaces for separating tasks and projects
The browser maker says it has around 4 million users and is still growing, helped by what von Tetzchner describes as a wave of users looking for something less intrusive. That tracks with a broader pattern in software: when the biggest platforms get noisier, smaller tools often win by being predictably boring in the right places.
Privacy, crypto and Microsoft’s latest missteps
Von Tetzchner’s objections are not limited to AI. He is equally uninterested in crypto features inside browsers, dismissing them as a bad fit and tying both trends to the same problem: more complexity, more data collection, more reasons to distrust what the browser is doing in the background.
He also says Vivaldi bundles Proton VPN with unlimited free traffic, and that the browser is available on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. That cross-platform reach matters because browser loyalty is weak enough already; if a privacy-focused alternative is going to grow, it has to meet people wherever they work and browse.
The Microsoft dig was predictable but effective. Von Tetzchner said he moved to Linux about a year ago, citing concerns over cloud sign-ins, automatic data uploads, and Windows features such as Recall, Microsoft OneDrive syncing, and the end of Windows 10 security updates for millions of PCs still running it.
The browser fight is really about control
Vivaldi is making a simple argument with a surprisingly sharp edge: browsers should serve users, not train them to accept a constant flow of prompts, summaries, and background data grabs. If the AI push keeps accelerating across the browser market, expect Vivaldi to keep using restraint as a feature – and to keep turning that restraint into a marketing advantage.