Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

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

A very lightweight social networking server, with a very clean web interface for viewing public posts. Compatible with Mastodon apps and interacts well with Mastodon and other major ActivityPub platforms on the Fediverse.

You can run it as a semi-private server, so your group can interact locally without the posts leaking, and still share public posts with followers on Mastodon etc. And they’ve been building in safety features like local-only posts, controls on who can reply, and so on.

It’s server-only, though. You can manage settings and your profile on the website, and others can view public posts, but all the interaction has to be done through an app like Elk (what I’m currently using on desktops), Ivory (on iOS), or Tusky (my preferred app on Android).

Hosting

It’s not meant for handling zillions of users. GoToSocial is more for setting up a server for your group or family or friends (or even just yourself) on a spare Raspberry Pi or cheap VPS host. It’s not as small as Snac (which is incredibly tiny!), but I’ve got GTS running quite well on a 1GB Linode.

Admin is a lot simpler than Mastodon. It can be a single binary or a single container, and just uses SQLite instead of running a full DB in a separate container. I’m running it on a 1GB Linode and haven’t had to add storage or (the website)RAM.

Basically the only sysadmin stuff I’ve done aside from setup in two years has been installing updates, which has just been incrementing the version number in docker-compose.

Beta and Compatibility

Interoperability is a lot better now than it was when I started testing it, and these days it interacts well with varieties of Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Snac, WordPress, etc. Bridgy Fed works with it now, and I’m able to follow Bluesky accounts (and vice versa). Postmarks can be patched to work with GTS. Threads* still won’t talk to GTS, and I still have trouble getting GTS and Lemmy to interact fully.

Right now it’s still in beta. Some of the more noticeable features that haven’t been built yet:

• post editing will be available in version 0.18 (though 0.17 does pick up incoming edits)
• link previews
• search posts (except your own)
• auto-delete (which I could probably hack together as a database script)

But it already handles most of what I need, and I’ve been using a personal server as my primary Fediverse presence since early 2024.

Before we start: Dillo (as in armadillo) is built for the web of documents, not applications. It intentionally doesn’t support JavaScript, and while it can work with server-side web apps, you have to jump through a few hoops to enable cookies on a given site.

That said…

Speed

Dillo is an incredibly fast ultra-minimalist web browser for Linux and other Unix-like systems. This makes it a good first choice on old or low-end hardware, or in a constrained virtual machine. You can keep another browser around as fallback for online apps that need JavaScript, complex styles, or newer features.

The lack of scripting also means that most advertisements and tracking won’t load in the first place, making it even faster (and good for privacy!)

Visuals

CSS support lags behind quite a bit compared to other web browsers, but that’s partly because development stalled for a decade when one of the project leads passed away.

Depending on how complex a site is, it might display just fine, or a little bit off, or be way off but still readable. Or broken. On sites powered by MediaWiki (Wikipedia, Fandom wikis, etc), for instance, the articles themselves are often readable, but the sidebars, headers or footers may look like they’ve been broken up into pieces.

And I keep having trouble getting it to display emoji consistently under Linux, though it displays them fine on macOS.

So whether Dillo works for you depends heavily on what you want to use it for. If you want to connect to Bluesky or read Gmail or anything like that…that’s not going to work. At all. Online shopping would be iffy at best. But if you’re searching for information, or hanging out at Metafilter, or actually reading stuff, it might be worth a look.

Fediversal

Unfortunately Dillo can’t show you the project’s own Mastodon account, because Mastodon requires JavaScript.

But a Snac timeline looks good – which makes sense, because Snac is ultra-minimalist itself – and you can even log into a Snac site and post, because Snac only requires baseline HTML and HTTP(s) to work! The UI is a bit clunky because the browser doesn’t support the HTML5 Details element (yet?), so all the forms and buttons and fields are visible all the time. But it works!

Small Internet and Other Plugins

There are plugins available to support various “small internet” protocols like Gemini and Gopher. And since even the oldest web browsers already support more formatting than Gemtext, plain text, or Gopher menus, they don’t suffer at all. I mean, yeah, Lagrange is prettier, but that’s all in the defaults, not the site support!

There are also plugins to enable IPFS, bookmark sync via Firefox accounts, and a dedicated reading mode.

Availability

Current packages (3.1 and up) are available in various Linux distributions including Fedora, Arch and Alpine, and in Homebrew for macOS.

Debian still has the old 3.0 release from before the multi-year gap, which is unfortunate because it doesn’t handle newer SSL/TLS, and there’s no Flatpak or Snap as far as I know, but you can still install it from source on Debian or an atomic distribution like Fedora Silverblue.

Apparently it works on Windows with Cygwin again, too! (I wrote up how to compile the old GTK+ version on Cygwin, back when I was maintaining RPM packages for installing Dillo on Fedora and a couple of other distributions, but that’s been obsolete since the switch to FLTK in 2008, and I eventually deleted it in one site cleanup or another.)

A convenient browser extension that detects cookie consent pop-ups and automatically fills them out according to your choices in the extension settings. So you only need to say (for example) “preferences are ok, but analytics and ad tracking aren’t” once instead of for every new site you visit.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited a website with a consent banner that it didn’t recognize.

By default it lets the pop-ups show briefly, so you know the site is tracking and you know the add-on is telling it what it can and can’t track, but you can also set it to hide them from the start if you’d rather not be bothered.

I’ve mostly used Arch Linux on my PineTab 2, and occasionally in virtual machines for tinkering. What I’ve found is that once it’s installed it’s generally fine! The biggest issue I have with it is remembering the options for pacman instead of apk or apt or dnf, and that’s only because I use a lot of different Linux distributions on a regular basis! But I don’t like the throwback to the old days of setting up a system by hand. Even Alpine has a better installation process.

Since it’s a rolling distribution, included software tends to get updated faster than Fedora or Debian. It has a smaller selection, but between Flatpak and AUR that’s less of an issue than it could have been. I haven’t seen updates break the system, so there’s clearly some process to keep things stable-ish upstream. The AUR pseudo-packages are sort of like RPM spec files. You do need enough technical know-how to install the dev tools and run the package builder from the command line.

The main Arch project is only built for x86_64, with no official ARM version, but I’ve been quite happy with with the Danctnix distribution for Pine64 devices. Not only is it quick to update its aarch64 branch from the upstream project, it’s also quick to include things like driver updates for Pine64 hardware (which has been kind of important since the device shipped before all the drivers were finished).

All that said, I wouldn’t recommend it for a novice, unless the novice wanted to use it as a learning experience. I would recommend the Arch wiki, which has helped me many times!