And then later I learned it was a cooperative effort, just not under the same name

Source?

They developed the “privacy sandbox” together.

Yeah that’s not true.

“Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it’s harder for users to investigate”, which is clearly an inaccurate statement.

Why is it an inaccurate statement?

What user are you thinking of?

You really felt misled that it was harder to inspect? What makes you think I have the expertise to inspect this? I’m not even a user and I wouldn’t know where to start to find the ad blocker within that tarball. Would you?

In any case, I clarified why it was harder to inspect - to me it felt obvious that being closed source made it harder to investigate. The fact that it is also shared source really has no bearing to the general observation, especially since we’re talking about a 2GB tarball where I don’t even know where to start. And I’m a pretty technical person.

How would a user easily investigate this vs. an open source browser?

It is, it is just source available. Still closed source.

I’m asking you what the misinformation is. Is this harder to investigate because the software is closed source? In my mind undoubtedly yes. I know it was harder for ME to investigate because it wasn’t open source - no open issue trackers, SCM repository, whatever.

So please tell me why what I said was misinformation - I’m really curious.

But it is, because making users download a 2GB repo and looking through the code, or crafting custom filter rules to investigate how rules work is harder than looking at a hosted source code repository (like what Brave has).

Where is the misinformation?

You don’t think a tarball dump is harder to investigate than a CVS repository? I never claimed it was impossible to investigate further, just that it was harder to.

Where is the misinformation?