Lots of people like Vivaldi for the many reasons stated in the comments. I personally feel its bloated, cluttered UI and it runs heavier on my system (compared to Helium and Ungoogled Chromium, which are both excellent browsers).
However, I daily drive Mullvad and Librewolf, with Zen for web presentations. I much rather these hardened Firefox browsers than Chromium based ones.
Is it even open source? If not, you can trust it as much as you trust any company with a profit motive.
It might be excellent in terms of performance (I don’t know), but it’s proprietary software and based on google chromium, so I rather keep away from it. Try https://floorp.app/
I should stick to Firefox forks like Waterfox, Librewolf, or Ironfox. I think Vivaldi has gone the way of Chromium as have many others.
Extensions you can run are Privacy Badger (EFF) and Port Authority.
The UI is proprietary and it’s too complicated to use IMO. I just use Trivalent for non-critical work like doing practice tests for driver’s license and Brave in Kicksecure VMs for Google, Claude Desktop (yes, it works on Linux), my school site and I also have my Gentoo-based development VM there.
Spoiler
Please don’t cancel me for my choices, OK? I don’t care about company’s politics or stances, I just care only about the product doing what it’s advertised to do and not doing anything shady behind the scenes.
Vivaldi is about as good as you can get with a Chromium based browser, but with the fundamental compromises that come with Chromium thanks to Google’s influence. It is European based so may have better governance and fundamental provacy than US based companies, but that is an assumption.
At the end of the day Vivaldi is a commercial browser, and that is a fundamental compromise that means it has to weigh up it’s commercial interests against users interests.
That said, I use Firefox as my main browser, Librefox for some other stuff, and occasionally use Vivaldi with a VPN extension for some stuff, and rarely Chromium without extensions if I have something low level to do on a site that I can’t be bothered messing around with fixing adblockers on. I don’t think you have to be all or nothing; it really depends on what you’re trying to do and when.
Vivaldi itself is well designed; it’s designed more for power users and tries to do everything. I just use it for browsing, but I appreciate the touches it offers. If you want to use a Chromium based browser, it’s a well made one.
good customizability, slow (ui is web based), proprietary
i’d just use firefox or ungoogled chromium instead
What’s crazy is that we even need to have this dicsussion about software to look at fkn web pages. Which of these fucks me over the least? Marketing ruins everything it encounters. Marketing to me on the web sites I view just isn’t enough… we’re stuck wondering which of these is going to harm my privacy the least. Feels like we’ve gone beyond the pale here.
Vivaldi is better than most. Most of it, is open-source, only the UI is not, for marketing/brand, etc reasons (they explained it better here https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/). I prefer to use Zen or arkenfox but since Mozilla appears to be following the “AI everywhere” route I will stick with Zen for now. For work related, sometimes I have to use a chromium browser so I use Vivaldi since I don’t like Brave. One other option would be to use ungoogled-chromium which is chromium but without any google spyware or services for that matter but, because of that, you can’t easily install extensions so it’s a trade-off.
I couldn’t find any fresh ungoogled-chromium builds, at least for my device. Isn’t the project actually dead?
No. If you are looking for binaries you have them here https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/
So they just don’t port/compile it for certain platforms anymore?
For what I remember they only compiled it to Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and some ARM architectures. You can always compile it yourself altho, the wait time is lengthy.
I’ve done this, and while it’s a good browser, it’s super annoying - so much easier to stick Arkenfox.js into Firefox where uBO was never under threat anyway.
The level of control Google has over the Chromium project is always going to be a major liability, so we must support other engines long term, and until Ladybird and other projects are out there, it’s Firefox.
It’s a shame to see how beholden pols have become to corpo-oligarchs, we’ll never see Google carved up the way AT&T was.
I agree, that’s the dream at least. Even Mozilla has been making poor choices (AI and changes to their privacy policy with more nuanced language so they can share your data with their partners, which goes directly against their old promise to never share it or collect it). My faith in them is very much shaken but yeah, they are still better than the alternative…for now.
I also default to Vivaldi when I need to use a Chromium browser, and I have found that I like the Feeds part of the browser better than Thunderbird. It is for sure the most customizable Chromium based option, so many tweak-able options. Aside from a couple of RSS feeds I check like once or twice a day, Zen and FF are my defaults for basically all browsing. I don’t tend to do things that make use of the AI stuff in FF, but honestly don’t really care if Mozilla has those options as long as they keep them as easy to disable as they currently are.
After they broke their promise to never collect our data, I’m not very optimistic towards the future of FF but for now, it’s kinda all we have
