Vivaldi (Web Browser)
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Iāve been using Vivaldi as my main web browser lately, after several years using it as an alternate when something wouldnāt work in Firefox.
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. IMO Opera lost its soul when it was bought out by a conglomerate. Brave has some interesting tech, but itās 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 Operaās co-founders. Itās basically what Opera would have been today if theyād 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?
Itās a power-user ultra-customizable internet suite including web, mail and news, built on the same āBlinkā engine as Chrome and other Chromium browsers.
Downsides:
- The engine still depends on the Google-defined monoculture.
- Vivaldiās own code isnāt capital-F Free Software.
Upsides:
- Youāre a lot less likely to run into a page that doesnāt work than you are with Firefox.
- You can use any Chrome extension.
- Vivaldi isnāt dropping support for older extensions (which Chrome is doing in favor of an API that makes it a lot harder to run ad blockers).
- Vivaldi isnāt including Googleās āTopicsā, in which Chrome tracks your activity for advertising purposes so websites donāt āhaveā to.
āTopicsā 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 wonāt 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.
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 Vivaldiās mobile app doesnāt support extensions.
The only real problem Iāve run into is that the browserās autofill sometimes crowds out the autofill from KeePass2Android (and possibly other password managers). I worked around it once by switching to KP2Aās keyboard, then deleted the one password I had saved in Vivaldi, but it does the same thing with saved addresses.
Sync
Every browser has a sync service these days. I only recently started using Vivaldi Link, and I turned off bookmark syncing because Iām using Floccus to sync bookmarks across Vivaldi and Firefox. The nice thing about Vivaldiās 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 couldnāt sell your sync data or use it to train AI even if they wanted to!
Beyond Web Pages
Vivaldi has continued to maintain an actual internet suite, including mail, calendar, and newsfeeds (RSS/Atom). I havenāt used these as much as I have used the web part, but I can add a few notes.
Feeds: Even if you donāt have the full suite enabled, itāll 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 inboxesā¦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 itās 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 youāre curious.
More info at Vivaldi (Web Browser).
Available from Vivaldi.com (Desktop), Flathub, Snapcraft, Google Play, App Store.