Vivaldi (Web Browser)

★★★★★

I’ve been using Vivaldi as my main web browser lately, after several years using Firefox as my primary and Vivaldi as an alternate when something didn’t work.

Why Not Another Chromium Browser?

Mainly because I trust Vivaldi more than Chrome, Opera, Brave or Edge. Chrome has slowly been becoming more and more of a funnel for Google accounts, with the advertising side of the company calling more of the shots. In my opinion, Opera lost its soul when it was bought out by a conglomerate. Brave has some interesting tech, but it’s also wrapped up in the cryptocurrency/venture capitalist investor world. And of course Edge is from Microsoft. (Though I find it hilarious that you can install Edge on Linux these days.)

Vivaldi comes from the small-tech side of things (the company is employee-owned, with no outside investors) and was co-founded by Jon von Tetzchner, one of Opera’s co-founders. It’s basically what Opera would have been today if they’d kept their focus on making a good browser that works for the person using it instead of working to squeeze out more profit for the conglomerate that owns the company.

What About the Software?

It’s a power-user ultra-customizable internet suite including web, mail and news, built on the same “Blink” engine as Chrome and other Chromium browsers.

Downsides:

• The engine still depends on the Google-defined monoculture.
• Vivaldi’s own code isn’t capital-F Free Software.

Upsides:

• You’re a lot less likely to run into a page that doesn’t work than you are with Firefox.
• You can use any Chrome extension.
• Vivaldi isn’t dropping support for older extensions until they have to (which Chrome is doing in favor of an API that makes it a lot harder to run ad blockers).
• Vivaldi isn’t including Google’s “Topics”, in which Chrome tracks your activity for advertising purposes so websites don’t “have” to.

“Topics” was actually the last straw for me, and I uninstalled Chrome everywhere I could. (Sadly, I still have one site that I have to use semi-regularly that won’t work in Vivaldi or Firefox, only in Chrome.)

Vivaldi is available on every platform I use regularly between work and home, including macOS, Linux, Windows and Android (plus iOS), and runs natively on both x86_64 and ARM. Yes, on Windows and Linux too. For Linux they provide DEB, RPM, Flatpak, and Snap packages for both architectures.

Recommended Extensions

• KeePassXC-Browser autofills from KeePass when you have a vault open.
• Floccus Bookmark Sync works across more browsers than just Vivaldi.
• Consent-O-Matic autofills cookie preferences.
• More add-on reviews…

Mobile

The Android app is noticeably faster than Firefox on my phone, and has most of the features of the desktop version. It also supports more capabilities for PWAs (installable web applications). The main thing I miss from Firefox is that Vivaldi’s mobile app doesn’t support extensions.

The only real problem I’ve run into is that the browser’s autofill sometimes crowds out the autofill from KeePass2Android (and possibly other password managers). I worked around it once by switching to KP2A’s keyboard, then deleted the one password I had saved in Vivaldi, but it does the same thing with saved addresses. Sometimes.

Sync

Every browser has a sync service these days. I only recently started using Vivaldi Link, and I turned off bookmark syncing because I’m using Floccus to sync bookmarks across Vivaldi and Firefox. The nice thing about Vivaldi’s is that you set a second password on your local devices for encrypting your data before it even gets sent to their servers, so Vivaldi couldn’t sell your sync data or use it to train AI even if they wanted to!

One thing that’s tripped me up a bit is the way tab sync works: With Firefox, you send the page you’re viewing now to the device you want to switch to. With Vivaldi, you leave the page open on the first device, then look for it in a drop-down list you get from a cloud icon in the tab bar on the device you’re going to. They’re both totally valid, but I was so used to the other way of doing it that I still fumble looking for the share buttons.

Beyond Web Pages

Vivaldi has continued to maintain an actual internet suite, including mail, calendar, and newsfeeds (RSS/Atom). I haven’t used these as much as I have used the web part, but I can add a few notes.

Feeds: Even if you don’t have the full suite enabled, it’ll show a human-readable version of feeds you might click on. If you do, you get a familiar feed reader app similar to NetNewsWire or Liferea.

Mail: Works with any IMAP or POP server, including Gmail. Handles multiple accounts, lets you work with combined inboxes…and combined folders, which can get confusing sometimes. I still feel more comfortable with Thunderbird, though.

Calendars/Tasks: Syncs with Vivaldi, Google, Apple, and standard CalDAV servers so it works with Nextcloud.

Contacts: Only syncs with a Vivaldi account, so it’s a non-starter as far as my Nextcloud setup goes.

Vivaldi.social: Mastodon-powered social network site, easy to set up and access in the sidebar, interacts with the rest of the Fediverse. A good way to check out Mastodon if you’re curious.

Notes