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 (Google still doesn’t offer aarch64 packages for Linux as of February 2025!). 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!

It took me a while before I noticed that the mobile version does have a “Send to devices” option, it’s just in the smaller, text-based list above the icons in the Share action, and the list of devices you can send to is behind that button. (Firefox shows a set of icons, one for each device, so it’s easier to spot.) You can also get a drop-down list of open tabs on other devices from the cloud icon in the tab bar.

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 browser, though.

Notes: Sync seamlessly between the sidebar on desktop and their own screen on mobile.

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’ve found I like Vivaldi’s mail client for a pass through new messages, but I still prefer Thunderbird overall, especially for organizing my archives.

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.

Online Community / Services

Vivaldi.net started out as a new home for the Opera community (as in the people who used it) when the company shut down the Opera Community (as in the hosted blogs, forums, and other services) back in 2014. It wasn’t until later, shortly before Opera (the company) broke up, that Vivaldi launched their own browser. Because of this, they still have some services you might not expect a browser company to provide:

Forums for users to talk about Vivaldi and random stuff, and to interact with developers. This is where you’d make a feature request or report a bug, or share tips with other Vivaldi users.

Blogs: Just general blog hosting, like Opera’s used to be! Runs on multi-site WordPress (the software) with plugins including The SEO Framework, ActivityPub (Fediverse compatibility), Akismet (spam filtering), and the Classic Editor for those of us who [prefer it over blocks]/reviews/software/wordpress-block-editor/.

Webmail (yes, webmail!): To cut down on spam and abuse they wait until you’ve been active on your account for a while before giving you access to webmail. It runs on Roundcube, the same software DreamHost uses. It’s got a good set of features and runs well, plus you can also connect to the account with any IMAP mail client (including Vivaldi, of course!)

Vivaldi.Social: A social network site running Mastodon, which interacts with the rest of the Fediverse. Easy to set up and access in the sidebar, making it a good way to check out Mastodon if you’re curious.

Notes