Guys use Vivaldi. It's a present. A browser that has a sustainable business model and interests that reconcile with the user interests - consume the web as god intended, with no literally aids and cancer ads out of the box. I switched a while ago from Firefox and while the UI is.. different, it's been a great experience. In my opinion this project and the great people behind it must be the leaders of this industry, and not the current crooked and twisted hegemony we have now.<p>I'm not affiliated. Happy user.
The real hegemony is the Blink hegemony. Google (an advertising company) can pretty much unilaterally dictate web standards. A terrible state of affairs for the web. That's the real issue and using another Chrome reskin is never going to fix it.
This is the main reason I stay away from Vivaldi; using Firefox is, for all of Mozilla's borderline comical mismanagement, a protest vote against Blink (and previously, Chromium).
For those wondering...:<p><i>"Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the free and open-source Chromium project. Blink is by far the most-used browser engine, due to the market share dominance of Google Chrome and the fact that many other browsers are based on the Chromium code."</i><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)</a>
<a href="https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/</a> lists<p>- Partner deals with search engines
- Partner deals with bookmark partners
- Partner deals through Direct Match
- <a href="https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-vpn-is-now-built-into-vivaldi/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-v...</a><p>How are integrated ads and dispatch of user data to third-parties sustainable sources of income?
It's Chromium so I'll continue using Firefox
Vivaldi for Android does not support extensions, making it a non-starter for me.
reposting here since I feel like this is a big deal and under reported.<p>beware, their sync will go down for weeks and you may lose all your data. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_sync_down_11_days_and_counting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_s...</a>
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all_my_sync_data_is_gone/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1htf6l7/all...</a>
a closed-source browser is a non-starter for me.
Furthermore I don't see a clear business model there that isn't about injecting ads.
<a href="https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...</a><p>It's open in all of the ways that matter, basically they just want to protect their look and feel.
Some of their arguments are ridiculous.<p>> A new project based on our code might implement features that are fundamentally in opposition to our ethics (e.g., damaging to privacy, human rights or to the environment). Even though we would not be associated with the project in any way, it can deeply affect how people see Vivaldi (and how we see ourselves), damaging a reputation we have taken pains to earn.<p>> You can’t test drive open-source and then close everything back off if it turns out that open-source isn’t working out.<p>At the same time they express regret that the Presto engine from their Opera roots didn't get open-sourced. Which was much more novel than just a Chromium re-skin.<p>The entire article can be summarized as "we worry that others might make a better product off our code" and "can't be arsed to meet the quality standards of the free software community".<p>No thank you.
I actively used Vivaldi for several months until recently - on my Mac it would intermittently crash for no reason I could find. I’ve since switched to ungoogled-chromium - it’s only a couple of weeks so it’s early days but so far it’s been very stable.
> interests that reconcile with the user interests<p>How are you paying them? And have you done any network analysis on it recently (I really would like to know!)?
aids and cancer, seriously?
Closed source and based on Webkit? At least Brave is open source.
I'd like to try Vivaldi, but the combination of being (partially) closed-source [1] and free-as-in-beer makes me feel like I must be the product.<p>Do they do any sort of third-party auditing of the closed parts?<p>[1] <a href="https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...</a>
source code is apparently* available to audit: <a href="https://vivaldi.com/source" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/source</a><p>* on my phone, can’t inspect the tars
Confusingly, that page only provides the changes to the Google Chromium source that allows their UI to run. (I'm not sure it would be easy to discern this without already knowing the source is not fully open.)<p><a href="https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-source/" rel="nofollow">https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-sou...</a>
Tarballs every 2 months, and we know these don't give you the Vivaldi browser as they supply it.<p>I don't trust them one bit. There was that telemetry analysis that showed Vivaldi as a very noisy browser.
Im not sure I understand their business model. I don’t see any paid offering on their website
Took 2 seconds to startpage* this: <a href="https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/</a><p>*screw Google and their AI search
Guess I’m blind, I somehow missed it… thanks!<p>So the answer seems to be:<p>- search partnerships<p>- direct match partnerships<p>- bookmarks partnerships<p>- donation<p>- cut when people sign up for advertised products (proton vpn, not sure if others)<p>Or at least that was the case in 2019
Search engine deals are HUGE for browsers. They're e.g. what has funded Mozilla with many billions over the last 20 years. Mozilla has tried to diversify but everything else has pales in comparison (and the donations are basically a joke).<p>It scales up with usage as well. Not that Safari needed funding, but Google pays Apple upwards of $20,000,000,000 per year for the privilege of being the default for that user base.
With Firefox, especially with Firefox on Linux, which always had and still has poor GPU support, I frequently encounter sites that do not work well or they do not work at all. So I must keep a backup browser, which is normally Vivaldi, because typically any site that works in Chrome also works in Vivaldi.<p>Moreover, Vivaldi has a great advantage over both Firefox and Chrome, in it the command to print a Web page usually works fine, while in both Firefox and Chrome it almost never works correctly.<p>Both Firefox and Chrome are almost never able to render correctly a "printed" page, even if they render the same page perfectly on screen. In the printed page, the graphic elements have almost always wrong sizes, which results in overlapped or invisible page elements. I suppose that this is caused by the fact that many Web pages stupidly use element sizes in pixels, instead of using length units, e.g. points or inches or mm, and both Firefox and Chrome might scale pixels wrongly when rendering for resolutions that differ from that of the screen, while Vivaldi scales them correctly.<p>Besides the "Print" command, the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands, as alternatives to keyboard shortcuts, so you do not need to move the hand from the mouse while browsing.
I always see these kind of comments, that many sites don't work in Firefox while they do in Chrome. When I encounter a broken site I always also check it in Chrome but the times where it is actually a browser's fault is like once a year. Usually it is some blocking of cookies or something that I have enabled in Firefox. Even sites from Google which everyone seems to describe that they are specifically made to work only in Chrome I never had issues with.
Yes I agree, there was a time where it was worse and FF just did not have the same support coverage for Browser APIs etc, but now if I encounter a problem in FF I tend toward blaming the website developer for ensuring it works ok.
Perhaps you use Firefox on Windows.<p>Firefox on Linux has much more problems than Firefox on Windows, mostly because it does not support many GPUs, so it frequently disables WebGL or it cannot use hardware support for playing videos, even now, in 2026. This breaks many sites.<p>Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies in comparison with their Windows versions.
That has not been my experience of Firefox on Linux.<p>Whenever I encounter a broken site, it's because I blocked some advertising scripts and the whole thing fell apart with a slew of JavaScript errors. I'm quite happy to avoid such shoddy sites.
Which is not Firefox's fault. It's up to the operating system to provide a stable API to make things like this work.
For the kind of things needed by Firefox, the Linux APIs have been stable for decades.<p>The problem is not stability, but the fact that there are multiple APIs, and it is unknown which of them will be available on the user system, so a browser may need to support all of them.<p>For instance, for video decoding on a GPU, the Linux APIs differ depending on the GPU vendor, unless you use Vulkan, but Vulkan video decoding is not available in old computers. Even so, Firefox could have used some higher-level API that takes care of the low-level GPU-dependent details (e.g. ffmpeg).<p>More baffling is the failure of Firefox to use OpenGL or Vulkan for implementing WebGL, depending on the GPU vendor, because at least the OpenGL API has not changed in a very long time. I have no idea which is the reason (because Firefox does not provide adequate error messages), unless they depend on some vendor-specific OpenGL extensions. I use an NVIDIA GPU, on which I cannot enable WebGL in Firefox, despite the fact that WebGL works fine in Vivaldi and Chromium/Chrome and I use a very great number of OpenGL and Vulkan applications, including some written by myself, all of which work perfectly, with no problems whatsoever.
> Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies
Most of the time I switch to Chrome it's for web apps that use APIs like Web Bluetooth or Web USB. No way to use those in Firefox as far as I'm aware.
Same experience, both on macOS and Linux.
Vivaldi is the only Chromium browser that actually breaks sites that work on Chromium(based) browsers itself. Mostly stuff like government ID login. A few European logins don't work, and haven't for years (!) with Vivaldi not giving a crap despite ample reports. Extra ironic since Vivaldi is touted as an EU alternative to US tech.
I really doubt that's as general of an occurrence as you make it up to be. There's a particular government process I can only do on Edge (no other browser works, chromium or not). For a certain login process in a different branch of government I can use Vivaldi or Firefox, but not Edge. I don't think you can single out a browser for this kind of thing.
Do you have examples of websites that don't work? Both because I'm curious and also so the devs can look into it?
I've never seen or heard of this before. Perhaps it is a user error.
Not sure what country you lived in, but having lived in different European countries, I never found this issue.<p>Have been a Vivaldi user for many years.
> mouse gestures<p>Vivaldi is made by people who left Opera after it was bought by a Chinese company, and the mouse gestures are similar. Ny favorites: "Hold right mouse button, click left" is the browser back gesture, and "hold left, click right" is forward.
I switched to Firefox when Opera ditched Presto and mouse gestures were the thing I missed the most (along with windowed tabs). Took me a long time to stop trying to use them, those commands were etched deep in my muscle memory. I remember trying a few extensions but they never managed to replicate how smoothly it worked in Opera.<p>You can tell the Vivaldi devs care about that kind of stuff. I don't want to use a chromium-based browser as my daily driver, but I like a lot of what they're doing.
I ran into broken printing when I was trying to turn web pages into PDFs. Both Chrome and Firefox couldn't "print" without breaking layout.
I am on linux with amd gpu and Firefox has been so much better than chromium browsers for a very long time.<p>You can open whatsapp web or a pdf or most other websites and just scroll. The difference is massive.
Firefox Linux user (wayland) here. I can’t remember the last time I had a browser issue or had to open an alternative browser.
> the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands<p>vivaldi was doing something weird for me, can’t exactly remember what now. seemingly unprompted it would switch tabs or go back in history or something.<p>turns out i’d tried to be clever, set up a mouse gesture and forgotten about it. xD
Closed-source/proprietary and downstream of Chrom* so contributes to browser monoculture. Thanks but no thanks, I'm sticking with Firefox.
Great job on the design refresh! I was a heavy Vivaldi user and especially liked the integrated tiling and tab grouping. But over time it got more and more bloated and performance suffered so now I just use vanilla Safari (didn’t expect that) for most browsing plus Helium when I need to test in Chromium.<p>I use Aerospace for tiling everything now but it breaks Safari scrolling performance so when that becomes annoying I force the Safari window to floating mode.
Vivaldi is all about customization but then they categorically refuse to add extension support to their android browser.<p>Imo extension is the ultimate way to customize your browser experience.<p>It's not technical difficulties, there are open source projects that have such support.<p>I also don't believe it's against any TOS because some of these browser are available in the Google play store.<p>I just don't get why they refuse to do that.
Probably it's a very low request priority. I use Vivaldi on Android with the built in blocking at strict. The last thing I remotely have interest in are Extensions in Android Vivalid.
I use on desktop Vivaldi, on Android I can recommend Cromite (some people like as well Helium and Ultimatum)
Because of stuff like this?
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207660">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207660</a><p>If you don't have the ability to police extensions you're basically putting your users up for sale?
How is this an argument when you can use extensions on the desktop version?
But they support extensions on desktop.<p>The problem you linked to also happened on desktop because there is no VSCode for phones.
Your users don't have to use those extensions, so I don't understand how that's relevant? People who do, should be made aware of risks and that's it. This is not a good argument against taking away their option to have that customization.
No, if that were true, there would be no extension support on non-mobile
They can add support for Chrome and Edge extensions marketplaces.
I have been using Vivaldi since it was an alpha build. It is the best browser hands down IMO. I have been here for the entire ride. I am so glad to see that there is not AI bundled in this release, which has been a major concern for me when anticipating future releases of this browser.<p>I hope they keep it up.
It's a lovely browser, and a lot of work has clearly been put into it. I should like it, because I used Opera for ages (in the Presto era), but it's just a little to busy for me.<p>There's way to much stuff, to many feature and when the rendering engine is just Blink, I don't really see much of a reason to use it over Firefox.<p>Nice work though and wonderful to see a 3rd party browser maker giving it a go.
I used Vivaldi for many years and was a huge advocate. The problem for me was the browser got too bloated and buggy. They kept adding functionality that for me wasn’t necessary. For example: built in Proton VPN support, calendars, email functionality, notes, a game arcade. I don’t want any of that bundled in my browser. I want my browser to be lite weight.<p>I eventually switched to Edge a few years ago because it was nice and lite. Now I’m seeing the same pattern play out as they add copilot, shopping, and rewards programs.<p>What browser should I check out next? Some must haves: workspaces, vertical tabs, and chromium extension support.
I was also a huge fan of Vivaldi. I’d recommend Helium or Orion (desktop only). People knock on Edge but it actually is a nice browser. When on a Windows box I don’t own I use it instead of Chrome. Edge has the best text-to-speech engine in reader mode which I reach for even on macOS on occasion. That’s the only reason I have it on macOS.
I found replacements for the Chrome extensions I was using and switched to Zen, which builds off of Firefox and closely resembles Arc (RIP).<p>It might not be the best security idea to rely on a relatively obscure browser like this, but I find it very pleasant to use.
Firefox generally has a lot of the same extensions. I use Zen browser (the OSS “arc-style” Firefox-based browser) on personal devices and generally like it a lot. It replicates a lot of what Arc did
Edge? You don't want the 'bloat' but you are OK with a browser siphoning all your info to M$ to be added to the borg entity.
+1 for Zen, its great
Firefox?
Every time I try use Vivaldi I encounter how incredibly slow the UI is. Are all Vivaldi users running it on specced out desktops? Or is it just ao lineux UI latency issue?
Same experience with UI performance, especially on Linux (Fedora). I went back to Zen Browser because of this, but frankly most browsers are performing worse for me on Linux than on Windows.
Same, even on the absolute highest end machines. It has been a few versions since I've given it a go and I otherwise like it but the perf decline over stock Chromium, sometimes randomly appearing, is what has always steered me away again in the past.
I'd guess it's the price for custom UI and customization features they're adding
It is always good to have more than one browser.
No, thanks. Vivaldi is proprietary software and therefore not trustworthy. Since the source code isn't fully available, there's no way to verify whether an update might secretly add a feature that collects data. Since the source code isn't fully available and you can't compile it yourself, there's no way to prevent a feature that collects data from being secretly added during an update.
The reasoning behind why it isn't open source is also complete nonsense. Just because it's easy to create a fork doesn't change the fact that most users will stick with the original as long as the fork doesn't offer significant improvements. With Firefox, people aren't flocking to the existing forks either.
Used Vivaldi for years but it kept breaking my workflows and would wipe out my meticulously assembled tab groups. After few such gaffes I switched to Brave. I really wanted Vivaldi to work but can’t let it break workflows.
Vivaldi is the browser, where I always wonder why it doesn't get mentioned in all the privacy enhanced browsers. It's the only browser for me, that reliably filters out all ads with ublock origin while working on all websites without any problems. Also the company behind Vivaldi is not in USA/China/Russia, which also helps from my point of view.
Because it's a proprietary closed source fork of Google Chromium. There's nothing to trust. If it's free and closed source, you are the product.
Privacy enhanced? lol. Install the Android version (similar to desktop I imagine):<p>- The choice in the wizard defaults to no blocking of ads and trackers<p>- Third Party cookies enabled by default<p>- WebRTC IP leaking is the default<p>- No option not to persist history/permanent incognito mode<p>Etc<p>I imagine it leaks your list of extensions just like chromium too
I loved Opera until they got rid of their in-house browser engine and became a Chromium fork, losing a lot of the functionality and UX I liked about the older versions. Ever since then, I have been very reluctant to use a closed source browser, since I don't want to have to go through another rug-pull of having a company completely change a browser without ability for the community to make a fork.
Vivaldi is the only browser where you can actually disable Ctrl+W from closing a tab. And that is why fat fingered I uses it.
Pure love from me to Vivaldi.<p>The only browser that allows me to tile 3,4,5... pages in the same view. Or to group pages into "stacks" or many other small but useful perks.
Respect the tremendous amount of work that went into this!<p>I appreciate the intention to protect my privacy. How does that square with Manifest V2 deprecation as dictated by the adtech company (Google)?<p>Also, for years I’ve been uncomfortable using Chromium as I’m uncomfortable raising that statistic any more, since I don’t want the Internet to be designed for one particular engine. Maybe Vivaldi 9.0 will be the biggest design overhaul of all time and even refactor based on Gecko like Firefox :)
Looks better than expected.<p>I just wish the address bar were expanding fully to the right when selected, with the "Show Full Address" setting on and right-side vertical tabs. Otherwise, one has to jump around the visible part of the address bar in order to find the right part.<p>Edit: details.
Another happy user here - it's the power users chromium fork. Criminally underrated. It's a small Norwegian team with no VC funding and a sustainable business model.<p>I understand if you want to stick with Firefox, but until Ladybird and co are ready for prime time, I'm sticking with Vivaldi.<p>This major release bump is a bit disapointing though. Was expecting some more headlining features than just a bit of a UI clean up.
I moved to Vivaldi before its 1.0 release and am still happy with, also surprised to see it mentioned so rarely. My previous browser was Firefox but I struggled with a few updates changing things I liked, mostly manageable with about:config until they landed the Australis UI. Made the jump to Vivaldi and it's been pretty great overall.<p>Page tiling is perhaps the killer feature, but overall I like how Vivaldi is a browser for power users who know how they want to use the web. I find it refreshing in the era of browsers trying to be very thin terminals. The only thing missing from Vivaldi is being truly FOSS instead of their hybrid source-available model.
> If you have been using Vivaldi for years, you have your setup exactly as you want it and you would not trade it for anything.<p>You wouldn't be able to even if you wanted because there is no good way to export/import your changes for the trade to happen<p>Otherwise removing a few borders seems a bit underwhelming for a major version bump
I always liked Vivaldi's simple+autohide layout. Unfortunately, the 3-4 times I tried to use it over the years I always ended up giving up due to random performance regressions over stock Chromium. It's been a few versions now though, maybe it's worth a go again.
beware, their sync will go down for weeks and you will lose all your data. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_sync_down_11_days_and_counting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1hgfmoh/vivaldi_s...</a>
still as bloated as ever?<p>can't we just have tabs + tiling (either tiles in tabs, or tabs in tiles, both can work), and call it a day?<p>that's all I need from browsing today
It is a great browser, thank you. Would you consider to add an option that signals scam websites and especially the ones that do not give the option of denying cookies or making it helly difficult being so in non compliance with gdpr. That is some data that you will be glad to sell, we get a better service and Eu warriors make some money on it.
Wait so you make a big announcement talking about a full new redesign but dont actually show a demo? That should be illegal
> Get away from Big Tech<p>> You deserve better<p>Probably better to avoid (Chromium-based) Vivaldi then.
Vivaldi is somehow the only Chromium-based browser whose extensions survive a macOS migration, presumably because they don't do the same extension encryption that other Chromium browsers do.<p>It's also fantastic for tab hoarders like me.
> This is Vivaldi. It always has been.<p>Wonder if the site dev was thinking of the astronaut pointing a gun at another astronaut meme when they put this in.
How does it compare with firefox? Can you add ublock and noscript?<p>Ah nevermind I see a chromium fork, I skip
A decent solution with vertical tabs!
Looks way better and almost everything is quite cohesive but then they add the weird arrow with an uggly box around it in the top right.
Why should I use it instead of, for example, Brave?
Been using Opera since the early 00s and followed the dev team to the new company Vivaldi. Using any other browser always feels like a massive downgrade to me. I'm grateful for this software. Made by people with a vision that doesn't suck completely.
I was an Opera user for years. Now I'm a Vivaldi user also since a long time. Best browser, FF/Chrome doesn't come close.
The killer feature of vivaldi is mouse gestures on every page. The killer feature of brave is the adblocker. I wonder if I can use some AI to maintain a frankenbrowser.
Two questions, how can you trust closed source? And how are they already on release 8.0; what are these significant improvement each time or is it like apple's yearly release?
> And how are they already on release 8.0;<p>First release was 11 years ago. Why not?<p>Also there is no standard for version releases. I mean there probably is, but none that you have to follow.<p>> how can you trust closed source?<p>Same as using Android or windows or iOS.
If version 8.0 makes you raise your eyebrows, just wait til you see what version Firefox and Chrome are on!
For me on Windows. It hangs a lot. Thus I uninstalled.
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