The former Opera CEO and co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner complains about alleged abuse of power on Google. The Vivaldi browser was temporarily excluded from Google AdWords.
The founder of Vivaldi Technologies, in the last blog entry, claims that Google is intended to deliberately put the competing Vivaldi browser out of the way.
As an example, von Tetzchner describes that Google blocked his AdWords account for promoting the new browser Vivaldi and thus an important source of income for almost three months. Vivaldi initiated a dialogue, but Google responded to the Vivaldi founder evasively, referring only to the vaguely formulated guidelines. In addition, Vivaldi Technologies provided guidelines for the design of its own website.
A further criticism is also against certain technical circumstances, so the Vivaldi browser, for example, in order to be able to use Google Docs, it must conceal its own identity, though Chrome and Vivaldi technically strongly similar.
Vivaldi web browser
Both Vivaldi and Chrome share the same engine under the hood, Chromium, which is essentially a Google open-source project built using WebKit and KHTML. This new web-browser aims to bring back all those features that were missing since Opera 12. Vivaldi browser was called in the name of the famous Italian compositor Antonio Vivaldi. The previous browser Opera was also named with reference to classical music. The web browser is not that popular, it’s relatively new, and it was launched in 2016.
Google: A monopoly both in search and advertising
Being a young web browser, Vivaldi used Google Adwords for advertising in order to gain a huge amount of traffic. However, Google seems to decide whether or not they want to advertise certain companies. Although Vivaldi is not yet a serious competitor in the browsers field, it may be in the future. Thus Google may have decided to shut down its Google Adwords Campaign. And there is a possibility that it could also eliminate it from its search results page.
However, we do not have any significant evidence that Google didn’t stop VivalAdwordsrds compaign for other reasons. And while no one came with a better search engine, Google remains and will remain the most used search engine in the world.
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My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil