cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/69330953

Hi guys, actually I was a hardcore Firefox and Brave browser user. Which means I have already used some powerful browsers available today.

Some days ago I posted a negative review about the Vivaldi browser, and another person commented that Vivaldi is not just a Chrome fork but more than that. So I thought, am I misunderstood about Vivaldi? Is Vivaldi really awesome and equivalent to Firefox and Brave? So I installed it and tried.

I am in Debian. In the native Debian repo there is no Vivaldi, but it’s downloadable from the official website as a .deb package. When we install the .deb package, it automatically adds the repo to the Debian repo list, so automatic updates are possible.

When I opened Vivaldi, it welcomed me with a welcome screen, and I needed to click around 6-7 times on the next button to land on the start page. I expected a minimal browser, and that’s ok; maybe it’s a part of customization. Then on the homepage there are some built-in bookmarks/speed dials. Maybe those are Vivaldi sponsors and partners. Vivaldi has to make some money to maintain the browser, right?.

The default search engine is startpage, which is very good. Btw, Firefox still has Google as default, which I really hate. There are lots and lots of options to customize the browser and make it ours, including sync to make the settings synced across platforms where we use the Vivaldi browser.

But the sync doesn’t seem to sync all settings, only some of them, also in extensions. Some extension settings, like SponsorBlock and dislike returns, are synced, but some other extensions, like AI Block for YouTube and Reddit Enhancer, have not synced across browsers.

I really want to talk about the adblocker on Vivaldi. Yeah, Vivaldi has an adblock and tracker blocker shield by default (turned off), but this is much less efficient at eliminating ads and cosmetic filtering on web pages. Somewhat in some popular news sites other than YouTube and Reddit, I still see ads and promotions. Also, the tracker blocking test online never gave me a 100% just with Vivaldi’s built-in blocker.

In such cases many extensions and filter lists come to help us make our web browsing more secure and faster. But recently installing and managing extensions on Vivaldi has become too hard. It’s also impossible to sideload extensions into Vivaldi by dragging and dropping CRX files. Also, when we are in the web store, there is always an annoying popup that says “Switch to Chrome.” Inside the setting, I turned on the brand browser as Chrome inside Vivaldi, so why is the pop-up still there? So finally, we have to download the zip file of an extension and extract it. Then, by enabling developer mode in vivaldi://extensions, we have to load it unpacked. But still, this won’t work effectively at all. I know it’s not intentionally done by Vivaldi, but Google’s stupid changes cause this.

Recently Google completely wiped MV3 from all Chromium-based browsers except ungoogled Chromium, Brave, Helium, etc., but Vivaldi is an independent company, right? Why does Vivaldi have to follow Google’s strict tricks to make advertising online more effective? Why shouldn’t Vivaldi make its own ad blocker more powerful, or instead of building it themselves, why don’t they consider making uBlock or AdGuard compatible with their browser? Finally, I figured out a way to sideload uBlock, but still it’s not working as amazingly as before.

So many will tell me to just use uBlock Lite, but even though uBlock Lite now has custom filter list options, adding 3 filter lists externally makes that extension crash only in Vivaldi. Then we reopen the extensions setting to see there is no filter list shown, not even the default one. Until we reset the extension settings completely, which removes the custom list we added.

Also in KDE (Wayland), the browser is working almost perfectly, but in GNOME I am unable to drag and reorder installed extensions on the toolbar by pressing and holding Ctrl. I figured out that GNOME has worse drag-and-drop support. But still, this works on every other browser like Brave, ungoogled-chromium, Helium, and Firefox, but why not on Vivaldi? Opening a support post on their forum didn’t even give a clear answer.

Finally, Vivaldi is a very good browser for productivity, customization, and more unnecessary control most people don’t need. But what about privacy? Do even they have anything in that browser to say the word “privacy” except an insufficient ad/tracker blocker? I wish Vivaldi and its developers would deeply look into its possible privacy protections on the modern web and ad/tracker-blocking capabilities.

Thank you.