Vivaldi Browser

As soon as you finish installing Vivaldi, the initial setup process prompts you to make several choices over the way it looks and functions like where you wish to place the tabs bar, your theme, and other aspects. This approach to customization makes it so it’s very unlikely that any two users of the browser will have an identical looking browser. However, the ultimate number of customization options falls short of the more personalization oriented Firefox while still ending up potentially too complicated to the least tech-savvy of chrome users. Being founded by the co-founder of Opera with a team of its developers, it shows its origins in its visual design more than in anything else. However, it introduces some extremely useful new features in a well-integrated way that keeps it far from being a rehashed Opera browser. One signature feature of the browser is tab stacking, accomplished by simply dragging and dropping tabs above one another. This I find very useful when multitasking as I can organize the heaps of tabs that accumulate categorically. However, what’s an even more productive Vivaldi feature is tiling tabs. If you’ve ever used a tiling windows manager, a multi-screen setup or done translation or programming work on a computer, you’ll know the type of productivity boost viewing different windows side-by-side can provide. With more and more of our work being done on the web, this is a much-appreciated new feature, at the very least by people who share my same use cases. Another two features of Vivaldi reside in its sidebar, where along with bookmarks, history, and downloads, you can access a notes-taking interface that is convenient and useful. The second feature of this sidebar is Web Panels, which is somewhat reminiscent of Opera’s Whatsapp and Messenger integration into a sidebar, but instead allows you to basically open mobile or stripped-down versions of sides in a resizable strip of your screen’s real estate. I personally find this feature redundant considering the browser’s tiling tabs functionality. Although from the settings menu alone, Vivaldi’s user interface appears to be rich in customization options, especially compared to Google Chrome. However, the degree of customization can’t even be compared to that offered by the Firefox about:config page to power users. This challenges its claim to being a customization oriented browser for power users, from my perspective. In addition, it can only keep up with the Chrome in capability by supporting add-ons from the chrome store, which is another way it falls behind Firefox in terms of functionality, the latter being capable of the insane feat of running a web server as an add-on. All this leads me to the conclusion that Vivaldi’s focus on personalization is more of a superficial visual one and it being aimed at power user is little more than a marketing scheme. Performance-wise, Vivaldi is neither bad or exceptionally good. As far as published benchmarks you can find, Vivaldi never scored best or worst scored compared to other browsers. From my own experience, it tends to excel at what Chrome excels at, like DRM streaming sites, youtube and opening large files using Google services but falling behind Firefox in handling complex Javascript.

Hard to add to the previous review before me. Excellent review. Myself Vivaldi is a great browser and very easy to use and customize. There is One item of important interest to me, the ability not to be ANNOYED by drop down menus under URL bar and search suggestions. Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Opera all do this. That is the reason Vivaldi, Pale Moon and Water Fox are installed on my 4 Dell computers. Vivaldi is plenty fast for me and have no major issues. Never liked Chrome or Google. Vivaldi is a work in progress that gets better all the time. It is hard not to like and use browsers that respect my privacy. Give Vivaldi a try!