I switched to Vivaldi years ago because I got sick of dealing with extensions; an update broke a few of my long relied on extensions and a search for alternatives showed hundreds of options. A few hours into my search for replacements I found a post somewhere by someone in a similar situation, one of the responses was "just install Vivaldi" and I did. In all the years since they have not made one change that has caused me grief or affected my use in the slightest, never have had to learn new features or adjust the way I work, I just get a new icon in the sidebar on occasion which I can ignore until I get curious or get sick of seeing it and remove it.
I use Vivaldi because of its Workspaces which have so much better UX than tab groups. I don't need to see my Social or my Tech tab group until I'm switching for it; Firefox shows them all the time - atleast I haven't found a way to hide them and associated tabs until I need them without having to launch a new window. In Vivaldi, they are ready to use immediately upon switching while keeping everything in the same window keeping my taskbar clean. All this while not making my CPU fans run like a jet engine.
I would rather have this experience with Firefox but they are probably more busy focusing on email, vpn and whatever the flavor of the month is.
Guys use Vivaldi. It's a present. A browser that has a sustainable business model and interests that reconcile with the user interests - consume the web as god intended, with no literally aids and cancer ads out of the box. I switched a while ago from Firefox and while the UI is.. different, it's been a great experience. In my opinion this project and the great people behind it must be the leaders of this industry, and not the current crooked and twisted hegemony we have now.
The real hegemony is the Blink hegemony. Google (an advertising company) can pretty much unilaterally dictate web standards. A terrible state of affairs for the web. That's the real issue and using another Chrome reskin is never going to fix it.
This is the main reason I stay away from Vivaldi; using Firefox is, for all of Mozilla's borderline comical mismanagement, a protest vote against Blink (and previously, Chromium).
> Firefox is controlled opposition practically owned by Google
And how does that "ownership" look like in practice? Has Google ever decided how things should be done "or else"? What Google does is pay a protection tax. Without Firefox around and independent, the EU is almost sure to break Chrome away from Google, especially with the warm EU-US relations now. So Google pays and is going to pay as much as it takes to keep Firefox alive, kicking, and doing whatever it wants.
Google Chrome needs Firefox to be moderately successful more than Firefox needs that money. Or else it might become someone else's Chrome.
> Follow the money
Everyone has this revelation once. If it was that easy then customers would practically own the company providing them the services. Do you and your fellow paying customers feel like you own any company, especially big-tech? Do you all control Netflix? Amazon? Apple?
> Everyone has this revelation once. If it was that easy then customers would practically own the company providing them the services. Do you and your fellow paying customers feel like you own any company, especially big-tech? Do you all control Netflix? Amazon? Apple?
A million individual voices are just noise which is what your "fellow paying customers" line equates. A single monetary contributor is not that. It is the sugar daddy of Firefox. Conflating the two seems to be a bad faith comparison.
Talking about bad faith, with Google's single, enormously powerful voice surely you can hear what it says. So why not answer to literally the first thing I asked in my comment instead of skipping straight to the end to claim bad faith? You should have laundry list of examples to show how Google flashes the cash and the orders, and Firefox executes. That's a sugar daddy.
You understand that if Firefox ever just becomes a puppet on Google hand the whole setup crumbles? It's barely at the edge of plausible deniability even today. Why kill the golden goose when Firefox is anyway in no position to become a real threat on the browser market any time soon.
Plenty of companies lived and died by their customers' "noise", or at least got a bloody nose, so that's a shallow dismissal.
My point was in support of that if not clearly stated.
Expecting FF to listen to a million individual users is not a good expectation. Expecting FF to be prone to listening to a single powerful voice would be a better expectation. However, FF has not assimilated into yet another Chrome, so there's some evidence they are not giving in to the whims of that powerful voice.
What is the advantage of building a browser engine from scratch? As opposed to just forking Blink and maintaining it as a separate project? Seems like the former just adds an ungodly amount of work and still doesn't solve the problem of Google using its weight to control web standards.
If Firefox and Apple can't rein in Google with their competing engines, what exactly does Ladybird change?
Linux and Windows do not have a goal of perfectly emulating the other one, to the degree of sharing the same spec and tests. Not sure how this example applies, especially since Blink is open source, while Windows is not.
In fact your example betrays you, because it would be like rewriting Linux from scratch while still attempting to maintain perfect compatibly with Linux. And then arguing that you've somehow weakened Linux in the process. Why not just fork it and maintain your own fork?
Ladybird is a failure of a project mirage headed by an extremely shady and slimy individual. I'm pretty sure he'd add tracking that sends all your browsing data to the CIA for a singular loaf of bread.
I like Servo, but it's also very early in its development. There's no choice but to hold on for now.
I love Zen but it doesn't support TouchID passkey auth on macOS. I'm someone who needs to Okta with multiple times a day, and this drove me to use Vivaldi instead.
Vivaldi is almost certainly the best Blink browser, and I'd certainly use it if only Blink browsers were viable. As long as that's not the case, I am, like you, using something based on Firefox; in my case, Zen.
"Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the free and open-source Chromium project. Blink is by far the most-used browser engine, due to the market share dominance of Google Chrome and the fact that many other browsers are based on the Chromium code."
I still can't really get behind the idea of a closed-source browser. Market dynamics aside, Chromium is at least open source (and if anything, most of the stuff that's bundled into the version of it that makes Chrome isn't particularly desirable to me anyhow). Firefox is not nearly bad enough for me to want to swap to a browser where the business model is the selling point.
It's closed source and chromium based, it's also really ugly looking IMO. The Android version also doesn't support addons so that's a huge fail. I'll stick with Zen.
They have affiliate bookmarks and as well as links that are injected when you type things in the address bar.
They don't append their affiliate code when you type the full url (like brave did that one time) at least but I feel like adding undisclosed sponsored suggestions to the autocomplete counts as "injecting".
For me, it's a privacy concern. Closed source means only one company is fixing vulnerabilities, whereas open source invites security researchers to find and fix issues quicker. Fewer security gaps == less privacy risk.
I've heard that argument before, but has that actually been demonstrated? Ability to look at the code (especially in the age of AI) means that security researchers aren't the only ones who can look for bugs. For example, look at the bugs like copyfail that AI has recently uncovered in the Linux kernel.
You are grasping for straws. No one said open source is perfect. But it's just an obvious fact that open source is going to be easier to audit than closed source.
But isn't that their point? In the age of AI, maybe being "easier to audit" is as much a risk than an assurance? I'm not sure I agree, but it is interesting to mull over. Further, either way, your tone and response is not very charitable, to say the least. From the outside, you are the only one blustering and grasping here. Not everything needs to be so antagonistic maybe?
> A new project based on our code might implement features that are fundamentally in opposition to our ethics (e.g., damaging to privacy, human rights or to the environment). Even though we would not be associated with the project in any way, it can deeply affect how people see Vivaldi (and how we see ourselves), damaging a reputation we have taken pains to earn.
> You can’t test drive open-source and then close everything back off if it turns out that open-source isn’t working out.
At the same time they express regret that the Presto engine from their Opera roots didn't get open-sourced. Which was much more novel than just a Chromium re-skin.
The entire article can be summarized as "we worry that others might make a better product off our code" and "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community".
> "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community".
Lol literally all the code is visible. Also all the Firefox forks I've seen are low-effort forks that even piggyback off Mozilla's servers for stuff like user authentication.
I disagree greatly here. I'd argue that the engine is the part that matters the least to users, it's the added UI/UX they want to be able to analyze and modify.
Blink won't send my bookmarks and passwords unencrypted to god knows where. The vivaldi UI might. I'd want to see the source for their system. Blink also doesn't have a built-in VPN or remotely togglable experiment system that I'd like to analyze, that's in the closed source part of Vivaldi.
If I want to add features that aren't possible through webextensions, chances are that I need to modify the UI, not the engine, to make it happen.
The UI was written in Javascript I believe. At least a few years ago when I tried it. I was pretty happy with it except for the lag which made it unusable on my hardware.
It is very much in the spirit of the old Opera browser. I miss the days when software was trying to be as cool as possible instead of trying to be as lame as possible. (God what a concept!)
I actively used Vivaldi for several months until recently - on my Mac it would intermittently crash for no reason I could find. I’ve since switched to ungoogled-chromium - it’s only a couple of weeks so it’s early days but so far it’s been very stable.
I’ll try to take your comment in good faith. And of course - that’s the trouble with issues like these isn’t it? I did find some reports online of the same but when there’s no consistent way of making it happen, there’s no simple solution either.
I ran it with no extensions and out of the other chromium-based browsers I’ve tried it’s the only one where I’ve had crash issues.
I hope you try out zen browser as well, It is really customizable and with Ublock origin installed, It becomes one of the best browsers.
And it is built on firefox's web engine itself which imo is an added benefit compared to blink on which vivaldi is from, @AegirLeet's comments about Blink hegemoney is true but also there shouldn't necessarily just be one web browser engine imo and that too created by google (blink), one can criticize mozilla/firefox and that is true but you aren't limited to firefox, there are zen browser, floorp, librewolf etc.
I highly recommend you to test zen-browser if you haven't already!
With Firefox, especially with Firefox on Linux, which always had and still has poor GPU support, I frequently encounter sites that do not work well or they do not work at all. So I must keep a backup browser, which is normally Vivaldi, because typically any site that works in Chrome also works in Vivaldi.
Moreover, Vivaldi has a great advantage over both Firefox and Chrome, in it the command to print a Web page usually works fine, while in both Firefox and Chrome it almost never works correctly.
Both Firefox and Chrome are almost never able to render correctly a "printed" page, even if they render the same page perfectly on screen. In the printed page, the graphic elements have almost always wrong sizes, which results in overlapped or invisible page elements. I suppose that this is caused by the fact that many Web pages stupidly use element sizes in pixels, instead of using length units, e.g. points or inches or mm, and both Firefox and Chrome might scale pixels wrongly when rendering for resolutions that differ from that of the screen, while Vivaldi scales them correctly.
Besides the "Print" command, the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands, as alternatives to keyboard shortcuts, so you do not need to move the hand from the mouse while browsing.
I always see these kind of comments, that many sites don't work in Firefox while they do in Chrome. When I encounter a broken site I always also check it in Chrome but the times where it is actually a browser's fault is like once a year. Usually it is some blocking of cookies or something that I have enabled in Firefox. Even sites from Google which everyone seems to describe that they are specifically made to work only in Chrome I never had issues with.
Yes I agree, there was a time where it was worse and FF just did not have the same support coverage for Browser APIs etc, but now if I encounter a problem in FF I tend toward blaming the website developer for ensuring it works ok.
Firefox on Linux has much more problems than Firefox on Windows, mostly because it does not support many GPUs, so it frequently disables WebGL or it cannot use hardware support for playing videos, even now, in 2026. This breaks many sites.
Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies in comparison with their Windows versions.
That has not been my experience of Firefox on Linux.
Whenever I encounter a broken site, it's because I blocked some advertising scripts and the whole thing fell apart with a slew of JavaScript errors. I'm quite happy to avoid such shoddy sites.
For the kind of things needed by Firefox, the Linux APIs have been stable for decades.
The problem is not stability, but the fact that there are multiple APIs, and it is unknown which of them will be available on the user system, so a browser may need to support all of them.
For instance, for video decoding on a GPU, the Linux APIs differ depending on the GPU vendor, unless you use Vulkan, but Vulkan video decoding is not available in old computers. Even so, Firefox could have used some higher-level API that takes care of the low-level GPU-dependent details (e.g. ffmpeg).
More baffling is the failure of Firefox to use OpenGL or Vulkan for implementing WebGL, depending on the GPU vendor, because at least the OpenGL API has not changed in a very long time. I have no idea which is the reason (because Firefox does not provide adequate error messages), unless they depend on some vendor-specific OpenGL extensions. I use an NVIDIA GPU, on which I cannot enable WebGL in Firefox, despite the fact that WebGL works fine in Vivaldi and Chromium/Chrome and I use a very great number of OpenGL and Vulkan applications, including some written by myself, all of which work perfectly, with no problems whatsoever.
It's crazy, but in 2026, websites still check the user agent string and will simply refuse to work if it's not one that they like. Financial and enterprise software is the worst for this. It's one of the reasons Vivaldi switched to simply copying the Chrome user agent string instead of their own.
Some sites also simply to not test their stuff on Firefox since it has such a small market share, and Firefox _does_ have minor incompatibilities that only tend to show up when using overly fancy Javascript or CSS frameworks. (But this is far less common than the first point above.)
Vivaldi is the only Chromium browser that actually breaks sites that work on Chromium(based) browsers itself. Mostly stuff like government ID login. A few European logins don't work, and haven't for years (!) with Vivaldi not giving a crap despite ample reports. Extra ironic since Vivaldi is touted as an EU alternative to US tech.
I really doubt that's as general of an occurrence as you make it up to be. There's a particular government process I can only do on Edge (no other browser works, chromium or not). For a certain login process in a different branch of government I can use Vivaldi or Firefox, but not Edge. I don't think you can single out a browser for this kind of thing.
I have issues with sites on Vivaldi but it's never due to Vivaldi itself. It always ends up being that case that either uBlock Origin or Vivaldi's own built-in ad/privacy blocker ended up blocking some javascript library that the site needs.
ProTip: Try to do your thing in Guest Mode. It will almost certainly work there.
Vivaldi is made by people who left Opera after it was bought by a Chinese company, and the mouse gestures are similar. Ny favorites: "Hold right mouse button, click left" is the browser back gesture, and "hold left, click right" is forward.
I switched to Firefox when Opera ditched Presto and mouse gestures were the thing I missed the most (along with windowed tabs). Took me a long time to stop trying to use them, those commands were etched deep in my muscle memory. I remember trying a few extensions but they never managed to replicate how smoothly it worked in Opera.
You can tell the Vivaldi devs care about that kind of stuff. I don't want to use a chromium-based browser as my daily driver, but I like a lot of what they're doing.
Maybe I just don't surf the web as much anymore, but everything I use or click on works in Firefox on Linux, I can't remember the last time I found something that didn't work (other than some Show HN fancy graphics thing)
> the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands
vivaldi was doing something weird for me, can’t exactly remember what now. seemingly unprompted it would switch tabs or go back in history or something.
turns out i’d tried to be clever, set up a mouse gesture and forgotten about it. xD
Confusingly, that page only provides the changes to the Google Chromium source that allows their UI to run. (I'm not sure it would be easy to discern this without already knowing the source is not fully open.)
Yoi can test this locally yourself with mitmproxy, opensnitch, or whatever.
Everyone opining here should MitM themselves every now and then. If not for your own security then maybe to make sure you're not participating in psyop when opining online and resharing hearsay or old truisms.
The difference is Chromium feels like Chrome if that's what you want to use and trust, it does not feel like Vivaldi and that's basically all that's provided here.
Search engine deals are HUGE for browsers. They're e.g. what has funded Mozilla with many billions over the last 20 years. Mozilla has tried to diversify but everything else has pales in comparison (and the donations are basically a joke).
It scales up with usage as well. Not that Safari needed funding, but Google pays Apple upwards of $20,000,000,000 per year for the privilege of being the default for that user base.
A lot of people might think $20B is a lot to pay. But search (and “other”) account for over half (>$200B) the of Alphabet’s total revenue from all sources. It’s still a bargain when you consider how few people bother to (or are even aware of the possibility of) changing their default browser.
I have been using Vivaldi since it was an alpha build. It is the best browser hands down IMO. I have been here for the entire ride. I am so glad to see that there is not AI bundled in this release, which has been a major concern for me when anticipating future releases of this browser.
Totally agree. It is the best browser across all platforms of mobile and desktop for me. I read on here all the excuses others make for not using Vivaldi but they don't pass the smell test for me. Long may Vivaldi prosper.
Vivaldi is the only browser I feel actually has features. Built-in RSS client, mail client, vertical tabs, workspaces, notes, saved sessions, tab groups, side by side tabs, profiles, etc.
To put more simply, just look at how many preferences its preference dialog has compared to other browsers. It feels like nobody else is even doing anything except coming up with a new CSS property nobody is going to use every 3 months.
Everyone says they love Firefox, but every time Firefox adds a new feature it's a feature Vivaldi already had for years.
I used Vivaldi for many years and was a huge advocate. The problem for me was the browser got too bloated and buggy. They kept adding functionality that for me wasn’t necessary. For example: built in Proton VPN support, calendars, email functionality, notes, a game arcade. I don’t want any of that bundled in my browser. I want my browser to be lite weight.
I eventually switched to Edge a few years ago because it was nice and lite. Now I’m seeing the same pattern play out as they add copilot, shopping, and rewards programs.
What browser should I check out next? Some must haves: workspaces, vertical tabs, and chromium extension support.
Recently switched to Helium, a super lightweight Chromium-based browser. It has vertical tabs, extension support, and tab groups and profiles, if that's what you mean by workspaces.
I was also a huge fan of Vivaldi. I’d recommend Helium or Orion (desktop only). People knock on Edge but it actually is a nice browser. When on a Windows box I don’t own I use it instead of Chrome. Edge has the best text-to-speech engine in reader mode which I reach for even on macOS on occasion. That’s the only reason I have it on macOS.
Firefox generally has a lot of the same extensions. I use Zen browser (the OSS “arc-style” Firefox-based browser) on personal devices and generally like it a lot. It replicates a lot of what Arc did
You also can't import bookmarks on Android. The officially recommended way is to sign up for a sync account and verify it (they don't accept throwaway emails), install on desktop, import on desktop, then sync to mobile.
Probably it's a very low request priority. I use Vivaldi on Android with the built in blocking at strict. The last thing I remotely have interest in are Extensions in Android Vivalid.
Your users don't have to use those extensions, so I don't understand how that's relevant? People who do, should be made aware of risks and that's it. This is not a good argument against taking away their option to have that customization.
It's a lovely browser, and a lot of work has clearly been put into it. I should like it, because I used Opera for ages (in the Presto era), but it's just a little to busy for me.
There's way to much stuff, to many feature and when the rendering engine is just Blink, I don't really see much of a reason to use it over Firefox.
Nice work though and wonderful to see a 3rd party browser maker giving it a go.
Every time I try use Vivaldi I encounter how incredibly slow the UI is. Are all Vivaldi users running it on specced out desktops? Or is it just ao lineux UI latency issue?
I've switched back and forth between Vivaldi and Firefox on Linux and MacOS for the last decade, and Vivaldi's UI feels much faster. Even on my 5yo laptop or 12yo gaming PC, I haven't noticed any real slowness with the UI, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that.
Same, even on the absolute highest end machines. It has been a few versions since I've given it a go and I otherwise like it but the perf decline over stock Chromium, sometimes randomly appearing, is what has always steered me away again in the past.
Same experience with UI performance, especially on Linux (Fedora). I went back to Zen Browser because of this, but frankly most browsers are performing worse for me on Linux than on Windows.
Vivaldi is the browser, where I always wonder why it doesn't get mentioned in all the privacy enhanced browsers. It's the only browser for me, that reliably filters out all ads with ublock origin while working on all websites without any problems. Also the company behind Vivaldi is not in USA/China/Russia, which also helps from my point of view.
I'm not sure if this [1] is still relevant, but it appears that Vivaldi makes money by promoting search engines and bookmarks to their users via their closed source, secret, Chromium fork.
If my usage of their Chromium clone is being used to sell search engines/website bookmarks, then I am indeed the product.
There does also seem to be a VPN option on their site that I'm assuming I can pay for, which seems it could be an actually buyable product rather than selling my usage of their browser.
"Being the product" refers to recording user behavior and processing it for gains. Displaying non-personalized ads (which are trivial to completely avoid in Vivaldi) is not that.
You have a different definition of "being the product" than I do. A business that takes money from advertisers in exchange for your attention is selling your attention. You are the product is shorthand for your attention is the product, short of slavery.
> - No option not to persist history/permanent incognito mode
That's something I've always wanted.
Only Firefox seems to offer it. Firefox can also open external links in incognito (eg if you tap a link in another app, it will open in a firefox private window)
Duckduckgo browser and Brave can be set to delete all data upon start, which is similar but not quite the same because things are still persisted until they're cleaned up at the next start (they say it happens on exit but it really happens on start, because catching exit isn't reliable or something).
Brave also has no way to have exceptions for certain websites (Duckduckgo can, they call it fireproofing).
Used Vivaldi for years but it kept breaking my workflows and would wipe out my meticulously assembled tab groups. After few such gaffes I switched to Brave. I really wanted Vivaldi to work but can’t let it break workflows.
Great job on the design refresh! I was a heavy Vivaldi user and especially liked the integrated tiling and tab grouping. But over time it got more and more bloated and performance suffered so now I just use vanilla Safari (didn’t expect that) for most browsing plus Helium when I need to test in Chromium.
I use Aerospace for tiling everything now but it breaks Safari scrolling performance so when that becomes annoying I force the Safari window to floating mode.
I loved Opera until they got rid of their in-house browser engine and became a Chromium fork, losing a lot of the functionality and UX I liked about the older versions. Ever since then, I have been very reluctant to use a closed source browser, since I don't want to have to go through another rug-pull of having a company completely change a browser without ability for the community to make a fork.
One of the main reasons I switched to Vivaldi a few years ago was that it allowed and even advertised a "classic" browser experience. By which I mean: tabs that behaved like tabs, visual separation, not a lot of useless whitespace and corner-radius-maxxed borders everywhere.
Looks like that's all gone now and Vivaldi is just yet another generic "flat design" browser. Time to look for something else...
Respect the tremendous amount of work that went into this!
I appreciate the intention to protect my privacy. How does that square with Manifest V2 deprecation as dictated by the adtech company (Google)?
Also, for years I’ve been uncomfortable using Chromium as I’m uncomfortable raising that statistic any more, since I don’t want the Internet to be designed for one particular engine. Maybe Vivaldi 9.0 will be the biggest design overhaul of all time and even refactor based on Gecko like Firefox :)
I just wish the address bar were expanding fully to the right when selected, with the "Show Full Address" setting on and right-side vertical tabs. Otherwise, one has to jump around the visible part of the address bar in order to find the right part.
I am talking about limited width of the address bar (when it’s part of the right column with tabs, taking a third of screen’s width at max), not its height or any other elements.
I always liked Vivaldi's simple+autohide layout. Unfortunately, the 3-4 times I tried to use it over the years I always ended up giving up due to random performance regressions over stock Chromium. It's been a few versions now though, maybe it's worth a go again.
>our biggest design overhaul, ever
>A new look for a new era
Oh god no, just STOP. It's fine the way it is! I dread these headlines from any software project, because it's always worse. Always - and I have to spend time trying restore things back to how it was. Why do software developers do this?
Another happy user here - it's the power users chromium fork. Criminally underrated. It's a small Norwegian team with no VC funding and a sustainable business model.
I understand if you want to stick with Firefox, but until Ladybird and co are ready for prime time, I'm sticking with Vivaldi.
This major release bump is a bit disapointing though. Was expecting some more headlining features than just a bit of a UI clean up.
I moved to Vivaldi before its 1.0 release and am still happy with, also surprised to see it mentioned so rarely. My previous browser was Firefox but I struggled with a few updates changing things I liked, mostly manageable with about:config until they landed the Australis UI. Made the jump to Vivaldi and it's been pretty great overall.
Page tiling is perhaps the killer feature, but overall I like how Vivaldi is a browser for power users who know how they want to use the web. I find it refreshing in the era of browsers trying to be very thin terminals. The only thing missing from Vivaldi is being truly FOSS instead of their hybrid source-available model.
No, thanks. Vivaldi is proprietary software and therefore not trustworthy. Since the source code isn't fully available, there's no way to verify whether an update might secretly add a feature that collects data. Since the source code isn't fully available and you can't compile it yourself, there's no way to prevent a feature that collects data from being secretly added during an update.
The reasoning behind why it isn't open source is also complete nonsense. Just because it's easy to create a fork doesn't change the fact that most users will stick with the original as long as the fork doesn't offer significant improvements. With Firefox, people aren't flocking to the existing forks either.
I have no idea what this is about, but this comment sounds like it was posted from the 90s. Do we also need to compile an extension to support playing *.wav files in it?
Vivaldi is somehow the only Chromium-based browser whose extensions survive a macOS migration, presumably because they don't do the same extension encryption that other Chromium browsers do.
It is a great browser, thank you. Would you consider to add an option that signals scam websites and especially the ones that do not give the option of denying cookies or making it helly difficult being so in non compliance with gdpr. That is some data that you will be glad to sell, we get a better service and Eu warriors make some money on it.
Been using Opera since the early 00s and followed the dev team to the new company Vivaldi. Using any other browser always feels like a massive downgrade to me. I'm grateful for this software. Made by people with a vision that doesn't suck completely.
The killer feature of vivaldi is mouse gestures on every page. The killer feature of brave is the adblocker. I wonder if I can use some AI to maintain a frankenbrowser.
Two questions, how can you trust closed source? And how are they already on release 8.0; what are these significant improvement each time or is it like apple's yearly release?
Some want major version numbers to mean "giant changes" and others want version numbers to mean "not just a security patch". Others want something between.
None of these approaches is any more correct than the other and theres zero chance of getting everyone to agree only one should be used. You just have to understand which delivery approach is being taken to consume it accordingly.
E.g. 1.4.8, 14.8, and 148 all tell their own story. 1.4.8 implies many small releases with a few decent size changes along the way. 14.8 implies a medium speed (perhaps ~yearly) regular delivery if bigger enhancements with minor patches/fixes in between. 148 implies a long running continuous rapid delivery of all things as they become available.
I switched to Vivaldi years ago because I got sick of dealing with extensions; an update broke a few of my long relied on extensions and a search for alternatives showed hundreds of options. A few hours into my search for replacements I found a post somewhere by someone in a similar situation, one of the responses was "just install Vivaldi" and I did. In all the years since they have not made one change that has caused me grief or affected my use in the slightest, never have had to learn new features or adjust the way I work, I just get a new icon in the sidebar on occasion which I can ignore until I get curious or get sick of seeing it and remove it.
I use Vivaldi because of its Workspaces which have so much better UX than tab groups. I don't need to see my Social or my Tech tab group until I'm switching for it; Firefox shows them all the time - atleast I haven't found a way to hide them and associated tabs until I need them without having to launch a new window. In Vivaldi, they are ready to use immediately upon switching while keeping everything in the same window keeping my taskbar clean. All this while not making my CPU fans run like a jet engine.
I would rather have this experience with Firefox but they are probably more busy focusing on email, vpn and whatever the flavor of the month is.
It’s my daily browser. Small glitches occasionally and can lag chrome releases, but the best absolute non-adware browser with powerful features.
I have it configured to be ultra minimal with the look of Arc that I loved.
Guys use Vivaldi. It's a present. A browser that has a sustainable business model and interests that reconcile with the user interests - consume the web as god intended, with no literally aids and cancer ads out of the box. I switched a while ago from Firefox and while the UI is.. different, it's been a great experience. In my opinion this project and the great people behind it must be the leaders of this industry, and not the current crooked and twisted hegemony we have now.
I'm not affiliated. Happy user.
The real hegemony is the Blink hegemony. Google (an advertising company) can pretty much unilaterally dictate web standards. A terrible state of affairs for the web. That's the real issue and using another Chrome reskin is never going to fix it.
This is the main reason I stay away from Vivaldi; using Firefox is, for all of Mozilla's borderline comical mismanagement, a protest vote against Blink (and previously, Chromium).
Firefox is controlled opposition practically owned by Google. Follow the money.
Ladybird seems to be the only hope, once available.
> Firefox is controlled opposition practically owned by Google
And how does that "ownership" look like in practice? Has Google ever decided how things should be done "or else"? What Google does is pay a protection tax. Without Firefox around and independent, the EU is almost sure to break Chrome away from Google, especially with the warm EU-US relations now. So Google pays and is going to pay as much as it takes to keep Firefox alive, kicking, and doing whatever it wants.
Google Chrome needs Firefox to be moderately successful more than Firefox needs that money. Or else it might become someone else's Chrome.
> Follow the money
Everyone has this revelation once. If it was that easy then customers would practically own the company providing them the services. Do you and your fellow paying customers feel like you own any company, especially big-tech? Do you all control Netflix? Amazon? Apple?
> Everyone has this revelation once. If it was that easy then customers would practically own the company providing them the services. Do you and your fellow paying customers feel like you own any company, especially big-tech? Do you all control Netflix? Amazon? Apple?
A million individual voices are just noise which is what your "fellow paying customers" line equates. A single monetary contributor is not that. It is the sugar daddy of Firefox. Conflating the two seems to be a bad faith comparison.
> It is the sugar daddy of Firefox.
Talking about bad faith, with Google's single, enormously powerful voice surely you can hear what it says. So why not answer to literally the first thing I asked in my comment instead of skipping straight to the end to claim bad faith? You should have laundry list of examples to show how Google flashes the cash and the orders, and Firefox executes. That's a sugar daddy.
You understand that if Firefox ever just becomes a puppet on Google hand the whole setup crumbles? It's barely at the edge of plausible deniability even today. Why kill the golden goose when Firefox is anyway in no position to become a real threat on the browser market any time soon.
Plenty of companies lived and died by their customers' "noise", or at least got a bloody nose, so that's a shallow dismissal.
My point was in support of that if not clearly stated.
Expecting FF to listen to a million individual users is not a good expectation. Expecting FF to be prone to listening to a single powerful voice would be a better expectation. However, FF has not assimilated into yet another Chrome, so there's some evidence they are not giving in to the whims of that powerful voice.
What is the advantage of building a browser engine from scratch? As opposed to just forking Blink and maintaining it as a separate project? Seems like the former just adds an ungodly amount of work and still doesn't solve the problem of Google using its weight to control web standards.
If Firefox and Apple can't rein in Google with their competing engines, what exactly does Ladybird change?
> What is the advantage of building a browser engine from scratch?
Straight from the source:
https://ladybird.org/posts/why-ladybird/
> What is the advantage of building a browser engine from scratch?
Same reason some of us choose Linux over Windows.
Linux and Windows do not have a goal of perfectly emulating the other one, to the degree of sharing the same spec and tests. Not sure how this example applies, especially since Blink is open source, while Windows is not.
In fact your example betrays you, because it would be like rewriting Linux from scratch while still attempting to maintain perfect compatibly with Linux. And then arguing that you've somehow weakened Linux in the process. Why not just fork it and maintain your own fork?
I heard Mozilla described as "Google's antitrust lawsuit insurance."
That doesn't really seem relevant these days though. Although I guess duopolies are totally fine.
In the US for sure but in the EU, that insurance is still relevant.
Ladybird is a failure of a project mirage headed by an extremely shady and slimy individual. I'm pretty sure he'd add tracking that sends all your browsing data to the CIA for a singular loaf of bread.
I like Servo, but it's also very early in its development. There's no choice but to hold on for now.
shady and slimy? what are you talking about?
This has been a lost cause for the past decade or so. Web developers don't target Firefox anymore because a 5% share isn't enough to matter.
Both projects (Chromium and Firefox) are open, so it's like Linux vs FreeBSD, but at least FreeBSD has a clear licensing advantage.
We need some billionaire class people to take their business from a site that won’t support Firefox, and say why. or whatever that’s less pie in sky
No defeatism though please, some of us will advocate till the end (pen & paper)
This is why I use Zen. All the benefits of Vivaldi, with the peace of mind supporting a Mozilla stack.
I love Zen but it doesn't support TouchID passkey auth on macOS. I'm someone who needs to Okta with multiple times a day, and this drove me to use Vivaldi instead.
Vivaldi is almost certainly the best Blink browser, and I'd certainly use it if only Blink browsers were viable. As long as that's not the case, I am, like you, using something based on Firefox; in my case, Zen.
For those wondering...:
"Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the free and open-source Chromium project. Blink is by far the most-used browser engine, due to the market share dominance of Google Chrome and the fact that many other browsers are based on the Chromium code."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
Blink is a virtual machine. It's like complaining about the Hegemony of Perl
I still can't really get behind the idea of a closed-source browser. Market dynamics aside, Chromium is at least open source (and if anything, most of the stuff that's bundled into the version of it that makes Chrome isn't particularly desirable to me anyhow). Firefox is not nearly bad enough for me to want to swap to a browser where the business model is the selling point.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ lists
- Partner deals with search engines - Partner deals with bookmark partners - Partner deals through Direct Match - https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-v...
How are integrated ads and dispatch of user data to third-parties sustainable sources of income?
Sustainable means those sources of income will continue, not that they are positive for users.
It's Chromium so I'll continue using Firefox
reposting here since I feel like this is a big deal and under reported.
beware, their sync will go down for weeks and you may lose all your data. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_s... https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all...
Vivaldi for Android does not support extensions, making it a non-starter for me.
The only browser that supports them on Android is Firefox - but Brave is my main browser and I can't seem to move away from it
It's closed source and chromium based, it's also really ugly looking IMO. The Android version also doesn't support addons so that's a huge fail. I'll stick with Zen.
a closed-source browser is a non-starter for me.
Good thing then, that you can download sources from: https://vivaldi.com/source/
That's not the full source code of the browser, that only includes the core engine. The UI is still closed source.
Furthermore I don't see a clear business model there that isn't about injecting ads.
They have affiliate bookmarks and as well as links that are injected when you type things in the address bar.
They don't append their affiliate code when you type the full url (like brave did that one time) at least but I feel like adding undisclosed sponsored suggestions to the autocomplete counts as "injecting".
Vivaldi has been doing exactly this for years now
Can I ask why?
For me, it's a privacy concern. Closed source means only one company is fixing vulnerabilities, whereas open source invites security researchers to find and fix issues quicker. Fewer security gaps == less privacy risk.
I've heard that argument before, but has that actually been demonstrated? Ability to look at the code (especially in the age of AI) means that security researchers aren't the only ones who can look for bugs. For example, look at the bugs like copyfail that AI has recently uncovered in the Linux kernel.
You are grasping for straws. No one said open source is perfect. But it's just an obvious fact that open source is going to be easier to audit than closed source.
No, I'm asking questions...... not pretending I have answers.
But isn't that their point? In the age of AI, maybe being "easier to audit" is as much a risk than an assurance? I'm not sure I agree, but it is interesting to mull over. Further, either way, your tone and response is not very charitable, to say the least. From the outside, you are the only one blustering and grasping here. Not everything needs to be so antagonistic maybe?
like dude. do u have to?
Great answer ..
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
It's open in all of the ways that matter, basically they just want to protect their look and feel.
Some of their arguments are ridiculous.
> A new project based on our code might implement features that are fundamentally in opposition to our ethics (e.g., damaging to privacy, human rights or to the environment). Even though we would not be associated with the project in any way, it can deeply affect how people see Vivaldi (and how we see ourselves), damaging a reputation we have taken pains to earn.
> You can’t test drive open-source and then close everything back off if it turns out that open-source isn’t working out.
At the same time they express regret that the Presto engine from their Opera roots didn't get open-sourced. Which was much more novel than just a Chromium re-skin.
The entire article can be summarized as "we worry that others might make a better product off our code" and "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community".
No thank you.
Are you reading the same article?
> "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community".
Lol literally all the code is visible. Also all the Firefox forks I've seen are low-effort forks that even piggyback off Mozilla's servers for stuff like user authentication.
> It's open in all of the ways that matter
I disagree greatly here. I'd argue that the engine is the part that matters the least to users, it's the added UI/UX they want to be able to analyze and modify.
Blink won't send my bookmarks and passwords unencrypted to god knows where. The vivaldi UI might. I'd want to see the source for their system. Blink also doesn't have a built-in VPN or remotely togglable experiment system that I'd like to analyze, that's in the closed source part of Vivaldi.
If I want to add features that aren't possible through webextensions, chances are that I need to modify the UI, not the engine, to make it happen.
If I'm a purist, of course I want it all open.
> want to be able to analyze and modify
You literally can if you want, it's just JavaScript and CSS, you just can't redistribute it as your own.
I tried Vivaldi a couple of years ago and it was slow as fuck
The UI was written in Javascript I believe. At least a few years ago when I tried it. I was pretty happy with it except for the lag which made it unusable on my hardware.
It is very much in the spirit of the old Opera browser. I miss the days when software was trying to be as cool as possible instead of trying to be as lame as possible. (God what a concept!)
It's good to see someone still trying.
Nope, I don't use closed source browsers. Hell no.
Have you tried to google "vivaldi source"? You might be suprised
I actively used Vivaldi for several months until recently - on my Mac it would intermittently crash for no reason I could find. I’ve since switched to ungoogled-chromium - it’s only a couple of weeks so it’s early days but so far it’s been very stable.
Sounds like a you problem. It never crashes on me.
I’ll try to take your comment in good faith. And of course - that’s the trouble with issues like these isn’t it? I did find some reports online of the same but when there’s no consistent way of making it happen, there’s no simple solution either.
I ran it with no extensions and out of the other chromium-based browsers I’ve tried it’s the only one where I’ve had crash issues.
I run on multiple machines without issue.
What an uncharitable take. Does the fact that the browser crashes on their machine offend you in some way?
Quite a bizarre response but whatever.
I hope you try out zen browser as well, It is really customizable and with Ublock origin installed, It becomes one of the best browsers.
And it is built on firefox's web engine itself which imo is an added benefit compared to blink on which vivaldi is from, @AegirLeet's comments about Blink hegemoney is true but also there shouldn't necessarily just be one web browser engine imo and that too created by google (blink), one can criticize mozilla/firefox and that is true but you aren't limited to firefox, there are zen browser, floorp, librewolf etc.
I highly recommend you to test zen-browser if you haven't already!
> interests that reconcile with the user interests
How are you paying them? And have you done any network analysis on it recently (I really would like to know!)?
Closed source and based on Webkit? At least Brave is open source.
I’m pretty sure Brave and Vivaldi are both based on Chromium/Blink not WebKit.
Thanks, that's what I get for commenting before the coffee kicks in.
aids and cancer, seriously?
With Firefox, especially with Firefox on Linux, which always had and still has poor GPU support, I frequently encounter sites that do not work well or they do not work at all. So I must keep a backup browser, which is normally Vivaldi, because typically any site that works in Chrome also works in Vivaldi.
Moreover, Vivaldi has a great advantage over both Firefox and Chrome, in it the command to print a Web page usually works fine, while in both Firefox and Chrome it almost never works correctly.
Both Firefox and Chrome are almost never able to render correctly a "printed" page, even if they render the same page perfectly on screen. In the printed page, the graphic elements have almost always wrong sizes, which results in overlapped or invisible page elements. I suppose that this is caused by the fact that many Web pages stupidly use element sizes in pixels, instead of using length units, e.g. points or inches or mm, and both Firefox and Chrome might scale pixels wrongly when rendering for resolutions that differ from that of the screen, while Vivaldi scales them correctly.
Besides the "Print" command, the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands, as alternatives to keyboard shortcuts, so you do not need to move the hand from the mouse while browsing.
I always see these kind of comments, that many sites don't work in Firefox while they do in Chrome. When I encounter a broken site I always also check it in Chrome but the times where it is actually a browser's fault is like once a year. Usually it is some blocking of cookies or something that I have enabled in Firefox. Even sites from Google which everyone seems to describe that they are specifically made to work only in Chrome I never had issues with.
Yes I agree, there was a time where it was worse and FF just did not have the same support coverage for Browser APIs etc, but now if I encounter a problem in FF I tend toward blaming the website developer for ensuring it works ok.
Perhaps you use Firefox on Windows.
Firefox on Linux has much more problems than Firefox on Windows, mostly because it does not support many GPUs, so it frequently disables WebGL or it cannot use hardware support for playing videos, even now, in 2026. This breaks many sites.
Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies in comparison with their Windows versions.
That has not been my experience of Firefox on Linux.
Whenever I encounter a broken site, it's because I blocked some advertising scripts and the whole thing fell apart with a slew of JavaScript errors. I'm quite happy to avoid such shoddy sites.
Which is not Firefox's fault. It's up to the operating system to provide a stable API to make things like this work.
For the kind of things needed by Firefox, the Linux APIs have been stable for decades.
The problem is not stability, but the fact that there are multiple APIs, and it is unknown which of them will be available on the user system, so a browser may need to support all of them.
For instance, for video decoding on a GPU, the Linux APIs differ depending on the GPU vendor, unless you use Vulkan, but Vulkan video decoding is not available in old computers. Even so, Firefox could have used some higher-level API that takes care of the low-level GPU-dependent details (e.g. ffmpeg).
More baffling is the failure of Firefox to use OpenGL or Vulkan for implementing WebGL, depending on the GPU vendor, because at least the OpenGL API has not changed in a very long time. I have no idea which is the reason (because Firefox does not provide adequate error messages), unless they depend on some vendor-specific OpenGL extensions. I use an NVIDIA GPU, on which I cannot enable WebGL in Firefox, despite the fact that WebGL works fine in Vivaldi and Chromium/Chrome and I use a very great number of OpenGL and Vulkan applications, including some written by myself, all of which work perfectly, with no problems whatsoever.
> Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies
It's crazy, but in 2026, websites still check the user agent string and will simply refuse to work if it's not one that they like. Financial and enterprise software is the worst for this. It's one of the reasons Vivaldi switched to simply copying the Chrome user agent string instead of their own.
Some sites also simply to not test their stuff on Firefox since it has such a small market share, and Firefox _does_ have minor incompatibilities that only tend to show up when using overly fancy Javascript or CSS frameworks. (But this is far less common than the first point above.)
Most of the time I switch to Chrome it's for web apps that use APIs like Web Bluetooth or Web USB. No way to use those in Firefox as far as I'm aware.
Same experience, both on macOS and Linux.
Vivaldi is the only Chromium browser that actually breaks sites that work on Chromium(based) browsers itself. Mostly stuff like government ID login. A few European logins don't work, and haven't for years (!) with Vivaldi not giving a crap despite ample reports. Extra ironic since Vivaldi is touted as an EU alternative to US tech.
I really doubt that's as general of an occurrence as you make it up to be. There's a particular government process I can only do on Edge (no other browser works, chromium or not). For a certain login process in a different branch of government I can use Vivaldi or Firefox, but not Edge. I don't think you can single out a browser for this kind of thing.
I have issues with sites on Vivaldi but it's never due to Vivaldi itself. It always ends up being that case that either uBlock Origin or Vivaldi's own built-in ad/privacy blocker ended up blocking some javascript library that the site needs.
ProTip: Try to do your thing in Guest Mode. It will almost certainly work there.
Do you have examples of websites that don't work? Both because I'm curious and also so the devs can look into it?
I've never seen or heard of this before. Perhaps it is a user error.
Not sure what country you lived in, but having lived in different European countries, I never found this issue.
Have been a Vivaldi user for many years.
> mouse gestures
Vivaldi is made by people who left Opera after it was bought by a Chinese company, and the mouse gestures are similar. Ny favorites: "Hold right mouse button, click left" is the browser back gesture, and "hold left, click right" is forward.
I switched to Firefox when Opera ditched Presto and mouse gestures were the thing I missed the most (along with windowed tabs). Took me a long time to stop trying to use them, those commands were etched deep in my muscle memory. I remember trying a few extensions but they never managed to replicate how smoothly it worked in Opera.
You can tell the Vivaldi devs care about that kind of stuff. I don't want to use a chromium-based browser as my daily driver, but I like a lot of what they're doing.
Firefox Linux user (wayland) here. I can’t remember the last time I had a browser issue or had to open an alternative browser.
Same here, with X11.
Same here, with Xlibre.
Maybe I just don't surf the web as much anymore, but everything I use or click on works in Firefox on Linux, I can't remember the last time I found something that didn't work (other than some Show HN fancy graphics thing)
I am on linux with amd gpu and Firefox has been so much better than chromium browsers for a very long time.
You can open whatsapp web or a pdf or most other websites and just scroll. The difference is massive.
I ran into broken printing when I was trying to turn web pages into PDFs. Both Chrome and Firefox couldn't "print" without breaking layout.
Tried Print Edit WE? “Recommended” extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit-we...
> the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands
vivaldi was doing something weird for me, can’t exactly remember what now. seemingly unprompted it would switch tabs or go back in history or something.
turns out i’d tried to be clever, set up a mouse gesture and forgotten about it. xD
> set up a mouse gesture and forgotten about it. xD
Classic
To do list: make huge spreadsheet of hotkeys across programs and periodically feed them back to myself as flashcards based on [lack of] usage
KeyCue didn’t seem to cut it but maybe skill issue
I'd like to try Vivaldi, but the combination of being (partially) closed-source [1] and free-as-in-beer makes me feel like I must be the product.
Do they do any sort of third-party auditing of the closed parts?
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
source code is apparently* available to audit: https://vivaldi.com/source
* on my phone, can’t inspect the tars
Confusingly, that page only provides the changes to the Google Chromium source that allows their UI to run. (I'm not sure it would be easy to discern this without already knowing the source is not fully open.)
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-sou...
https://github.com/ric2b/Vivaldi-browser
Someone mirrored it.
Tarballs every 2 months, and we know these don't give you the Vivaldi browser as they supply it.
I don't trust them one bit. There was that telemetry analysis that showed Vivaldi as a very noisy browser.
> we know these don't give you the Vivaldi browser as they supply it.
how so? how do you know this?
Yoi can test this locally yourself with mitmproxy, opensnitch, or whatever.
Everyone opining here should MitM themselves every now and then. If not for your own security then maybe to make sure you're not participating in psyop when opining online and resharing hearsay or old truisms.
Because they are open about including closed parts. Its not a FLOSS browser.
Probably because they update the browser way more often than that
so it’s not a perfect solution :shrugs: i’ll take imperfect over nothing
In comparison to Google Chrome?
The difference is Chromium feels like Chrome if that's what you want to use and trust, it does not feel like Vivaldi and that's basically all that's provided here.
Im not sure I understand their business model. I don’t see any paid offering on their website
Took 2 seconds to startpage* this: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
*screw Google and their AI search
Guess I’m blind, I somehow missed it… thanks!
So the answer seems to be:
- search partnerships
- direct match partnerships
- bookmarks partnerships
- donation
- cut when people sign up for advertised products (proton vpn, not sure if others)
Or at least that was the case in 2019
Search engine deals are HUGE for browsers. They're e.g. what has funded Mozilla with many billions over the last 20 years. Mozilla has tried to diversify but everything else has pales in comparison (and the donations are basically a joke).
It scales up with usage as well. Not that Safari needed funding, but Google pays Apple upwards of $20,000,000,000 per year for the privilege of being the default for that user base.
A lot of people might think $20B is a lot to pay. But search (and “other”) account for over half (>$200B) the of Alphabet’s total revenue from all sources. It’s still a bargain when you consider how few people bother to (or are even aware of the possibility of) changing their default browser.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...
I have been using Vivaldi since it was an alpha build. It is the best browser hands down IMO. I have been here for the entire ride. I am so glad to see that there is not AI bundled in this release, which has been a major concern for me when anticipating future releases of this browser.
I hope they keep it up.
Totally agree. It is the best browser across all platforms of mobile and desktop for me. I read on here all the excuses others make for not using Vivaldi but they don't pass the smell test for me. Long may Vivaldi prosper.
Being closed source doesn't pass the smell test?
Vivaldi is the only browser I feel actually has features. Built-in RSS client, mail client, vertical tabs, workspaces, notes, saved sessions, tab groups, side by side tabs, profiles, etc.
To put more simply, just look at how many preferences its preference dialog has compared to other browsers. It feels like nobody else is even doing anything except coming up with a new CSS property nobody is going to use every 3 months.
Everyone says they love Firefox, but every time Firefox adds a new feature it's a feature Vivaldi already had for years.
Closed-source/proprietary and downstream of Chrom* so contributes to browser monoculture. Thanks but no thanks, I'm sticking with Firefox.
I used Vivaldi for many years and was a huge advocate. The problem for me was the browser got too bloated and buggy. They kept adding functionality that for me wasn’t necessary. For example: built in Proton VPN support, calendars, email functionality, notes, a game arcade. I don’t want any of that bundled in my browser. I want my browser to be lite weight.
I eventually switched to Edge a few years ago because it was nice and lite. Now I’m seeing the same pattern play out as they add copilot, shopping, and rewards programs.
What browser should I check out next? Some must haves: workspaces, vertical tabs, and chromium extension support.
Recently switched to Helium, a super lightweight Chromium-based browser. It has vertical tabs, extension support, and tab groups and profiles, if that's what you mean by workspaces.
I was also a huge fan of Vivaldi. I’d recommend Helium or Orion (desktop only). People knock on Edge but it actually is a nice browser. When on a Windows box I don’t own I use it instead of Chrome. Edge has the best text-to-speech engine in reader mode which I reach for even on macOS on occasion. That’s the only reason I have it on macOS.
I found replacements for the Chrome extensions I was using and switched to Zen, which builds off of Firefox and closely resembles Arc (RIP).
It might not be the best security idea to rely on a relatively obscure browser like this, but I find it very pleasant to use.
Firefox generally has a lot of the same extensions. I use Zen browser (the OSS “arc-style” Firefox-based browser) on personal devices and generally like it a lot. It replicates a lot of what Arc did
Edge? You don't want the 'bloat' but you are OK with a browser siphoning all your info to M$ to be added to the borg entity.
+1 for Zen, its great
Firefox?
Vivaldi is all about customization but then they categorically refuse to add extension support to their android browser.
Imo extension is the ultimate way to customize your browser experience.
It's not technical difficulties, there are open source projects that have such support.
I also don't believe it's against any TOS because some of these browser are available in the Google play store.
I just don't get why they refuse to do that.
You also can't import bookmarks on Android. The officially recommended way is to sign up for a sync account and verify it (they don't accept throwaway emails), install on desktop, import on desktop, then sync to mobile.
Probably it's a very low request priority. I use Vivaldi on Android with the built in blocking at strict. The last thing I remotely have interest in are Extensions in Android Vivalid.
I use on desktop Vivaldi, on Android I can recommend Cromite (some people like as well Helium and Ultimatum)
Because of stuff like this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207660
If you don't have the ability to police extensions you're basically putting your users up for sale?
But they support extensions on desktop.
The problem you linked to also happened on desktop because there is no VSCode for phones.
Your users don't have to use those extensions, so I don't understand how that's relevant? People who do, should be made aware of risks and that's it. This is not a good argument against taking away their option to have that customization.
I'm having a hard time finding a thread where people don't complain about npm when the real issue is packages being compromised.
Swap packages for extensions in the above and let me know how that's different
But what's your argument? That phone-based extensions are more vulnerable somehow than desktop extensions?
If anything, wouldn't a phone extension be more sandboxed than most desktop environments?
How is this an argument when you can use extensions on the desktop version?
No, if that were true, there would be no extension support on non-mobile
They can add support for Chrome and Edge extensions marketplaces.
It's a lovely browser, and a lot of work has clearly been put into it. I should like it, because I used Opera for ages (in the Presto era), but it's just a little to busy for me.
There's way to much stuff, to many feature and when the rendering engine is just Blink, I don't really see much of a reason to use it over Firefox.
Nice work though and wonderful to see a 3rd party browser maker giving it a go.
Every time I try use Vivaldi I encounter how incredibly slow the UI is. Are all Vivaldi users running it on specced out desktops? Or is it just ao lineux UI latency issue?
I've switched back and forth between Vivaldi and Firefox on Linux and MacOS for the last decade, and Vivaldi's UI feels much faster. Even on my 5yo laptop or 12yo gaming PC, I haven't noticed any real slowness with the UI, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that.
Same, even on the absolute highest end machines. It has been a few versions since I've given it a go and I otherwise like it but the perf decline over stock Chromium, sometimes randomly appearing, is what has always steered me away again in the past.
Same experience with UI performance, especially on Linux (Fedora). I went back to Zen Browser because of this, but frankly most browsers are performing worse for me on Linux than on Windows.
I'd guess it's the price for custom UI and customization features they're adding
Vivaldi is the browser, where I always wonder why it doesn't get mentioned in all the privacy enhanced browsers. It's the only browser for me, that reliably filters out all ads with ublock origin while working on all websites without any problems. Also the company behind Vivaldi is not in USA/China/Russia, which also helps from my point of view.
Because it's a proprietary closed source fork of Google Chromium. There's nothing to trust. If it's free and closed source, you are the product.
> you are the product
Then we need to have a discussion about that because in case of Vivaldi you are in fact not the product.
Happy to discuss.
I'm not sure if this [1] is still relevant, but it appears that Vivaldi makes money by promoting search engines and bookmarks to their users via their closed source, secret, Chromium fork.
If my usage of their Chromium clone is being used to sell search engines/website bookmarks, then I am indeed the product.
There does also seem to be a VPN option on their site that I'm assuming I can pay for, which seems it could be an actually buyable product rather than selling my usage of their browser.
1. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
"Being the product" refers to recording user behavior and processing it for gains. Displaying non-personalized ads (which are trivial to completely avoid in Vivaldi) is not that.
You have a different definition of "being the product" than I do. A business that takes money from advertisers in exchange for your attention is selling your attention. You are the product is shorthand for your attention is the product, short of slavery.
> in case of Vivaldi you are in fact not the product
I’m really curious what gave you this impression. Vivaldi doesn’t hide its business model, yet you were so confident!
Privacy enhanced? lol. Install the Android version (similar to desktop I imagine):
- The choice in the wizard defaults to no blocking of ads and trackers
- Third Party cookies enabled by default
- WebRTC IP leaking is the default
- No option not to persist history/permanent incognito mode
Etc
I imagine it leaks your list of extensions just like chromium too
> - No option not to persist history/permanent incognito mode
That's something I've always wanted.
Only Firefox seems to offer it. Firefox can also open external links in incognito (eg if you tap a link in another app, it will open in a firefox private window)
Duckduckgo browser and Brave can be set to delete all data upon start, which is similar but not quite the same because things are still persisted until they're cleaned up at the next start (they say it happens on exit but it really happens on start, because catching exit isn't reliable or something).
Brave also has no way to have exceptions for certain websites (Duckduckgo can, they call it fireproofing).
Pure love from me to Vivaldi.
The only browser that allows me to tile 3,4,5... pages in the same view. Or to group pages into "stacks" or many other small but useful perks.
Used Vivaldi for years but it kept breaking my workflows and would wipe out my meticulously assembled tab groups. After few such gaffes I switched to Brave. I really wanted Vivaldi to work but can’t let it break workflows.
Great job on the design refresh! I was a heavy Vivaldi user and especially liked the integrated tiling and tab grouping. But over time it got more and more bloated and performance suffered so now I just use vanilla Safari (didn’t expect that) for most browsing plus Helium when I need to test in Chromium.
I use Aerospace for tiling everything now but it breaks Safari scrolling performance so when that becomes annoying I force the Safari window to floating mode.
I mainly use Vivaldi because it has the best vertical tabs experience among the browsers.
Vivaldi is the only browser where you can actually disable Ctrl+W from closing a tab. And that is why fat fingered I uses it.
Firefox also provides such an option, see about:keyboard
Wow! Is this a new feature? I swear it wasn't there when I looked into it a few years ago. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
Yes, it was added in version 147 this January.
I loved Opera until they got rid of their in-house browser engine and became a Chromium fork, losing a lot of the functionality and UX I liked about the older versions. Ever since then, I have been very reluctant to use a closed source browser, since I don't want to have to go through another rug-pull of having a company completely change a browser without ability for the community to make a fork.
Well, fuck.
One of the main reasons I switched to Vivaldi a few years ago was that it allowed and even advertised a "classic" browser experience. By which I mean: tabs that behaved like tabs, visual separation, not a lot of useless whitespace and corner-radius-maxxed borders everywhere.
Looks like that's all gone now and Vivaldi is just yet another generic "flat design" browser. Time to look for something else...
Respect the tremendous amount of work that went into this!
I appreciate the intention to protect my privacy. How does that square with Manifest V2 deprecation as dictated by the adtech company (Google)?
Also, for years I’ve been uncomfortable using Chromium as I’m uncomfortable raising that statistic any more, since I don’t want the Internet to be designed for one particular engine. Maybe Vivaldi 9.0 will be the biggest design overhaul of all time and even refactor based on Gecko like Firefox :)
Wait so you make a big announcement talking about a full new redesign but dont actually show a demo? That should be illegal
Not just that but the screenshots are terrible too...
> If you have been using Vivaldi for years, you have your setup exactly as you want it and you would not trade it for anything.
You wouldn't be able to even if you wanted because there is no good way to export/import your changes for the trade to happen
Otherwise removing a few borders seems a bit underwhelming for a major version bump
Looks better than expected.
I just wish the address bar were expanding fully to the right when selected, with the "Show Full Address" setting on and right-side vertical tabs. Otherwise, one has to jump around the visible part of the address bar in order to find the right part.
Edit: details.
You can right-click on any part of the top bar and select 'remove'
I am not sure how this is relevant?
I am talking about limited width of the address bar (when it’s part of the right column with tabs, taking a third of screen’s width at max), not its height or any other elements.
I always liked Vivaldi's simple+autohide layout. Unfortunately, the 3-4 times I tried to use it over the years I always ended up giving up due to random performance regressions over stock Chromium. It's been a few versions now though, maybe it's worth a go again.
> Get away from Big Tech
> You deserve better
Probably better to avoid (Chromium-based) Vivaldi then.
What else are they supposed to do, when the new eras just keep coming every other year?
Another happy user here - it's the power users chromium fork. Criminally underrated. It's a small Norwegian team with no VC funding and a sustainable business model.
I understand if you want to stick with Firefox, but until Ladybird and co are ready for prime time, I'm sticking with Vivaldi.
This major release bump is a bit disapointing though. Was expecting some more headlining features than just a bit of a UI clean up.
I moved to Vivaldi before its 1.0 release and am still happy with, also surprised to see it mentioned so rarely. My previous browser was Firefox but I struggled with a few updates changing things I liked, mostly manageable with about:config until they landed the Australis UI. Made the jump to Vivaldi and it's been pretty great overall.
Page tiling is perhaps the killer feature, but overall I like how Vivaldi is a browser for power users who know how they want to use the web. I find it refreshing in the era of browsers trying to be very thin terminals. The only thing missing from Vivaldi is being truly FOSS instead of their hybrid source-available model.
It is always good to have more than one browser.
No, thanks. Vivaldi is proprietary software and therefore not trustworthy. Since the source code isn't fully available, there's no way to verify whether an update might secretly add a feature that collects data. Since the source code isn't fully available and you can't compile it yourself, there's no way to prevent a feature that collects data from being secretly added during an update. The reasoning behind why it isn't open source is also complete nonsense. Just because it's easy to create a fork doesn't change the fact that most users will stick with the original as long as the fork doesn't offer significant improvements. With Firefox, people aren't flocking to the existing forks either.
beware, their sync will go down for weeks and you will lose all your data. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_s...
I've had sync not working occasionally but I've never ever lost my data in over a decade of using Vivaldi.
still as bloated as ever?
can't we just have tabs + tiling (either tiles in tabs, or tabs in tiles, both can work), and call it a day?
that's all I need from browsing today
> still as bloated as ever?
That's their thing. Though a lot can be disabled.
> can't we just have tabs + tiling
Maybe Min or Zen Browser is more your thing?
both fail at supporting arbitrary tilings/splits (think vscode splits, or tmux panes)
Vivaldi has this. Ctrl/Cmd click multiple tabs and art the layout.
Is mouse support in Vivaldi still broken?
I have no idea what this is about, but this comment sounds like it was posted from the 90s. Do we also need to compile an extension to support playing *.wav files in it?
Sorry, couldn't resist... :)
I believe MiddleClickAutoscroll was broken in last "stable" GNU/Linux version. I can check once I'm on my laptop.
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/102072/no-autoscroll-on-midd...
The proposed solution didn't work by the way. I uninstalled right there.
Vivaldi is somehow the only Chromium-based browser whose extensions survive a macOS migration, presumably because they don't do the same extension encryption that other Chromium browsers do.
It's also fantastic for tab hoarders like me.
Why should I use it instead of, for example, Brave?
Looks way better and almost everything is quite cohesive but then they add the weird arrow with an uggly box around it in the top right.
You can just right-click and hide it, though.
A decent solution with vertical tabs!
> This is Vivaldi. It always has been.
Wonder if the site dev was thinking of the astronaut pointing a gun at another astronaut meme when they put this in.
It is a great browser, thank you. Would you consider to add an option that signals scam websites and especially the ones that do not give the option of denying cookies or making it helly difficult being so in non compliance with gdpr. That is some data that you will be glad to sell, we get a better service and Eu warriors make some money on it.
How does it compare with firefox? Can you add ublock and noscript?
Ah nevermind I see a chromium fork, I skip
Been using Opera since the early 00s and followed the dev team to the new company Vivaldi. Using any other browser always feels like a massive downgrade to me. I'm grateful for this software. Made by people with a vision that doesn't suck completely.
Another Chrome skin
The killer feature of vivaldi is mouse gestures on every page. The killer feature of brave is the adblocker. I wonder if I can use some AI to maintain a frankenbrowser.
I was an Opera user for years. Now I'm a Vivaldi user also since a long time. Best browser, FF/Chrome doesn't come close.
For me on Windows. It hangs a lot. Thus I uninstalled.
Two questions, how can you trust closed source? And how are they already on release 8.0; what are these significant improvement each time or is it like apple's yearly release?
> And how are they already on release 8.0;
First release was 11 years ago. Why not?
Also there is no standard for version releases. I mean there probably is, but none that you have to follow.
> how can you trust closed source?
Same as using Android or windows or iOS.
If version 8.0 makes you raise your eyebrows, just wait til you see what version Firefox and Chrome are on!
Which is even more nuts, especially with the features removed from Firefox sometimes like the grouped tabs removal then regain.
Some want major version numbers to mean "giant changes" and others want version numbers to mean "not just a security patch". Others want something between.
None of these approaches is any more correct than the other and theres zero chance of getting everyone to agree only one should be used. You just have to understand which delivery approach is being taken to consume it accordingly.
E.g. 1.4.8, 14.8, and 148 all tell their own story. 1.4.8 implies many small releases with a few decent size changes along the way. 14.8 implies a medium speed (perhaps ~yearly) regular delivery if bigger enhancements with minor patches/fixes in between. 148 implies a long running continuous rapid delivery of all things as they become available.