How Vivaldi browser is different from Google Chrome

I&#x27;ve recently switched from Firefox to Vivaldi, for one reason: Firefox extensions must use javascript injection to capture keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures. This basically kills all shortcuts+gestures that quickly change tabs, which is how I navigate 95% of the time.<p>I was a big fan of Opera, so I decided to try Vivaldi, which has built-in features for this.<p>After a few months I&#x27;m probably switching back again due to two problems:<p>- Vivaldi runs a lot of stuff on the main UI thread, leading to unresponsive interfaces (try the History Panel with a large history, it takes several seconds to type each character in the search bar, and just having the panel open slows down every other tab).<p>- The Android browser doesn&#x27;t support extensions, and the ad-blocking is not as good as Firefox Mobile + uBlock Origin.<p>If not for those two problems, I would keep it. It&#x27;s a great browser and I admire its passion for its own power users.

&gt; If you look closely, you’ll notice that no-one has built a new engine from scratch in 20 years.<p>That&#x27;s not true. Servo is new, which is where Mozilla are picking their changes to Gecko&#x2F;Quantum from. These false blanket statements aren&#x27;t convincing me to use Vivaldi at all. Sure it has it&#x27;s fair share of issues, but it &quot;works&quot; to a degree and maybe it&#x27;ll chug along enough to finally be used by 2022.<p>Currently I&#x27;m using Ungoogled Chromium [1] on Windows and Bromite [2] on Android, but the latter will eventually be replaced with the former when I end up building Ungoogled Chromium TriChrome (it&#x27;s a build mechanism for Android 10 and above to have a shared library package, as well as a WebView and browser package separately for Android).<p>Ungoogled Chromium is great because it accomplishes all that Vivaldi does, except syncing, all the while keeping the nice UI of Chrome. I&#x27;m not a fan of syncing, so that doesn&#x27;t matter to me.<p>I used to use Firefox on desktop (prior to and after the Quantum update) but WebGPU was just way to slow for me and I switched to a Chromium-based application.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bromite.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bromite.org</a>

I keep wanting to give it a good go, but I&#x27;m hooked on containers in Firefox (with cookie auto delete) which is a shame because FF just seems to be getting slower for me, and the dev tools have fallen behind Chrome IMO<p>But I just feel happier having certain things always open in their own container, and not sharing cookies or anything with other ones - all my news sites are in one, banking in another etc<p>I know they&#x27;ve said it&#x27;s hard to do, and I don&#x27;t doubt them, but until someone else implements containers I can&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t move.

The question which need to be asked about Chrome clones and mods is not what additional features they have added or removed. That is still &quot;addons&quot; territory. The question which needs be asked - did you (developer) made any different decision at all about Google made decision. E.g. Google decides to abandon some protocol, or add support of some protocol, or whey decided to abandon some core option which adblockers depend on etc. Did you (developer) made a different decision at that point, forked code and maintain your decision independently from Google. Until that happens all the Chrome mods are just that - slightly lagging behind Chrome versions with addons.

I&#x27;ve tried multiple times. Basically, you get an absolutely bloated interface (or should I say OS-replacement?), containing a word processor and minigames. All things work, but none of them work good.<p>Also, absolutely no tracking protection by default, I&#x27;ve found nothing about how their sync protocol works (is it e2ee?), so I take their argument of &quot;vivaldy is better for your privacy than Chrome&quot; with a grain of salt.

&gt; Moreover, Chromium was becoming the de facto web standard meaning that if we wanted web pages to not break, we’d have to fork Chromium.<p>This is why we need more users on non-Chrome browsers. I&#x27;m sad that Microsoft ditched Edge, and a major reason that I use Firefox is to keep Google from 100% control of the web (well I guess 95% of non-iPhone users). Vivaldi noted that this is a problem, but instead of helping they made it worse. &quot;Not in my backyard&quot; at its finest.

One feature Vivaldi has that I can&#x27;t live without is the tabs on the side, as the image shows: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;tab-management-tricks-vivaldi&#x2F;#1_View_titles_of_tabs_by_positioning_tabs_vertically" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;tab-management-tricks-vivaldi&#x2F;#1_Vi...</a><p>which makes a lot of sense since we mostly have widescreens and tab titles need to be readable - the alternative is to go for minimalism and not be a tab hoarder.<p>Vivaldi also has a tab management panel where you can select multiple tabs and close them (it also lists the closed tabs if you want to reopen any), or bookmark all of them, etc.<p>Edit to add: ah, #2 in link above is also another great feature: Hit F2 and get a Spotlight-esque search. If you have 100 tabs open in 4 windows and want to jump to a particular tab, you can hit F2 and type in part of the title, e.g. &quot;Wikipedia&quot;, and it will suggest your open tabs which has &quot;Wikipedia&quot; as part of the title, as well as recently closed tabs.

Firefox is my main browser, but I have Vivaldi installed for when I need to check if something works properly in Chromium. Having a vertical tab bar out of the box is my main motivation for that.

Am I the only one that has multiple browsers that you use regularly?<p>Firefox is my main personal browser<p>Chrome is on the second monitor with twitch and social networking sites<p>Edge is my work browser<p>Vivaldi is for my part time job<p>I also keep Waterfox installed for the old version of video download helper which works on some videos the new version doesn&#x27;t work on.

For me, Vivaldi has the best vertical tabs implementation in a Chromium-based browser. I look forward to seeing how Edge tackles the same task.<p>The user interface isn&#x27;t perfect, but the tabs work well, the keyboard short-cuts work well, and you can install any of the Chrome extensions you want to ad-blocking, etc

Well it&#x27;s closed source, so that makes it a non-starter as a platform to drive most of my Internet usage.

Why does most of the chromium based browser so ungrateful to them. Vivaldi doesn&#x27;t mention Chromium in the homepage even once but has &quot;Chrome vs Vivaldi&quot; comparison in the homepage. At least they should mention it, and better contribute back to it, if the 99.9% of your product is based on open source project.

I didn&#x27;t know much about Vivaldi prior to this post. Was happy to find a page on their blog explaining how they make their money:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vivaldi-business-model&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vivaldi-business-model&#x2F;</a>

Sorry, Vivaldi is not meaningfully open-source[0], so this makes it very difficult for me to care about any purported benefits it has to offer. Which is a shame because is seems like it has some nice features, but without checking this very important prerequisite box, I unfortunately will not even consider it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;source&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;source&#x2F;</a> exists but only releasing tarballs is pretty lame, there&#x27;s no source repository where I can browse&#x2F;fork, no public bug tracker where I can contribute to issue reports. A conventional, permissive, free-software license is not in use, as far as I can tell.<p>Vivaldi wouldn&#x27;t behave like any of the other software that runs on my computer. That&#x27;s not good.<p>I understand and appreciate that Vivaldi is different from Chrom(e|ium). That just doesn&#x27;t make a difference to me.

It&#x27;s great that we have all these choices for privacy-focused browsers.<p>How does <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iridiumbrowser.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iridiumbrowser.de&#x2F;</a> compare to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brave.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brave.com</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com</a> ?<p>It seems like Iridium can install any Chrome plugins and is available in the normal repos for Debian&#x2F;Ubuntu, FreeBSD, etc (as well as Windows&#x2F;Mac), but it&#x27;s not backed by a company (and the company&#x27;s marketing dollars), so it might be even more privacy-focused. (I do see a lot more crashes with Iridium than Brave on a systemd-removed Debian-based system, however.)

I interned at a company which makes Chromium mods tailored for a specific market (not Vivaldi), so AMA.<p>In short what we did is pretty much the same thing as other Chromium mods: take the Chromium source and add a bunch of features on top of it. Some features that I could remember:<p>* English dictionary &#x2F; translator (our market&#x27;s native language is not English)<p>* Video downloader (includes Youtube)<p>* Torrent client<p>* Multithreaded downloading<p>* Facebook unblocker. The company operates a bunch of proxy servers, and the browser can be remotely configured to proxy certain sites through those servers. Handy when the government decides to block Facebook&#x2F;Medium&#x2F;...<p>* PIP video before Chrome has one<p>* Sidebar

No iOS version means a no go for me, since I like to use the same browser for mobile and desktop.<p>There&#x27;s a guy in their forums saying two years ago that &quot;iPhone usage will drop to mac level usage (~8%)&quot;[1], which is laughable.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.vivaldi.net&#x2F;topic&#x2F;31772&#x2F;mobile-vivaldi-for-ios?_=1610711668372&amp;lang=en-US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.vivaldi.net&#x2F;topic&#x2F;31772&#x2F;mobile-vivaldi-for-ios...</a>

What we can do in Vivaldi that I love<p>- Quick commands popup (imagine Sublime Text&#x2F;Visual Code Ctrl Shift P) - Keyboard shortcuts to do anything, especially to hide and show tab bar, hide and show address bar and even hide title bar - Ublock Origin works (compared to Safari)<p>What stopped me using after a week<p>- Energy consumption is toooo high (compared to using Firefox&#x2F;Safari) that kept me close to the electric outlet.

&gt; If you look closely, you’ll notice that no-one has built a new engine from scratch in 20 years.<p>This seems a little dismissive of the Servo project.

Vivaldi certainly is a very different experience; the customisation options are very interesting and powerful.<p>Since I like, and have, to use multiple broswers (mostly Vivaldi, Firefox and Brave) the customisation is a bit overwhelming. Were it my only browser I doubt that would be an issue.<p>The &quot;zero tracking&quot; aspect aligns with our own values, as a search engine company. We are not a &quot;partner&quot; so this comment is not coloured by that.<p>Vivaldi allows our search users to set up Mojeek and other search engines&#x2F;services in fair way using codes; a bit like !bangs; shown here for Vivaldi search partners and Mojeek. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mojeek.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;popping-your-filter-bubble-with-search.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mojeek.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;popping-your-filter-bubble-w...</a>

Anyone has experience in running WPE as your daily driver in W10 laptop or Debian desktop or raspberry or Android phone? I want a further optimized webkit&#x2F;chromium engine browser that uses less memory, more responsive, less ui clutter, no tracking, no extra features. I just want a simple browser.<p>WPE claims to focus on embedded and low-consumption computer.<p>Where can I get a nice optimized precompiled binary for the common platforms? I tried luakit in raspberry, very slow, even slower than default chromium.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;wpe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;wpe&#x2F;</a>

Closed source browser, skip it. Open source Brave still being a thing.

I wish Firefox would consider adopting some of Vivaldi&#x27;s best UX improvements instead of fiddling with the size of the ultramegabar and dropping TV show promos into updates.<p>Vertical tabs is the one that most comes to mind. For people with many tabs open, tabs at the top is a completely broken experience. Tree style tabs is OK but it doesn&#x27;t remove the redundant tabs at the top, cluttering the screen.<p>Edit: If you want to compete for market share with chrome, this is a great way to do it! =)

I was using Vivaldi when something needed to be done using Chromium. After MS updated Edge, it got an outstanding built-in text-to-speech engine, I couldn&#x27;t find any more merit towards moving back to Vivaldi (since I love using that feature, it was a deal-maker).<p>note: I&#x27;m already using a windows machine and am not much of a privacy evangelist. But, Vivaldi is an excellent browser with a neat feature set and I totally see its appeal to power users.

I used Vivaldi for almost two years before switching back to Firefox. I loved the amount of customization you are able to do through the GUI. I miss that a bit in Firefox but after Firefox and their great leap forward in speed won me back a couple years ago, I haven&#x27;t looked back. I really wish Gecko &#x2F; Quantum was an accessible and interesting alternative to Chromium.

Vivaldi should have explained what their business model is, and how that drove their architecture, choices, etc.

After reading various criticisms of Vivaldi and Firefox here I&#x27;m surprised no one has mentioned Brave. I use Brave and I&#x27;ve been enjoying it thoroughly. It&#x27;s fast, it seems to take an earnest shot at security, and all my Chrome extensions work.

It has a proper menu bar, that alone makes it a thousands times better than Chrome for me.

I got the impression that their developers mainly use Windows when I tried it on Linux. It wasn&#x27;t possible to resize tab title font and the interface was nowhere near the responsiveness I remembered from Opera.

I was on a search for a good browser for an older machine that was lighter on resources. I tried vivaldi but ended up with SlimBrowser and have been happy so far with the experience.

I tried vivaldi, but found its slowness and the bugs in making it show a blank tab for new windows and tabs not worth it. Especially when its missing firefox’s container tabs

Does Vivaldi have the option to always block all requests to a blacklist of domains? That would be a killer feature for me, which Chrome doesn&#x27;t have.

FIDO2 user ? 1. Downloaded browser 2. Login in Coinbase with FIDO2 compatible hardware key 3. Vivaldi doesn&#x27;t recognize 4. Deleted browser<p>All what you need to know

A: it supports vertical tab-bar out of the box<p>thou wish they&#x27;d put more effort into tab-grouping, the tabkit ff-plugin pushed this to perfection some time ago.

Just tried it and I quite like the ability to keep dedicated &quot;web panels&quot; open on the side, is there any way to do the same in Chrome?

As much as I wanted to love Vivaldi, I had to go back to Opera. It&#x27;s the Chrome engine wrapped into what I exactly want a browser to be.

I like how they mention KHTML and Gecko&#x2F;Quantum as it gives a good perspective, but I feel like the reasoning behind &#x27;chromium&#x27; is the defacto internet standard is pretty weak.<p>I mean, having one dominating browser engine is a sickness (it weakens the standards) and not something internet companies should embrace. But I understand their reasoning about resources.

vivaldi is my daily driver both on windows n ubuntu. but damn, it can be slow at times. but in terms of ux it is unmatched.

Can&#x27;t trust a closed source browser.

I&#x27;ve been using Brave. I like it because it&#x27;s not Google, but cannot comment on what&#x27;s under the hood.

Personally moved from using Firefox for the last 15yrs over to Brave after the Mozilla CEO called for further internet censorship this week. Sad.

It&#x27;s slow and hangs up&#x2F;freezes quite a bit due to the exotic decision for the ui to be rendered on a common thread.

I dont use anything chrome based out of principle. I am not a skin deep person. Fts. Too big to fork. Too big to even call it open source.

I actually tried Vivaldi the other day for the first time in a while, and every so often the browser frame&#x2F;chrome just completely freezes on macOS. Tabs will not close, I couldn&#x27;t open any new tabs etc. So it was a non-starter for me, hopefully this is an isolated issue. A bit of a shame because purely from a browser frame UI perspective I found it refreshing (however I do dislike the left&#x2F;bottom bars). But one thing that irritated me is the right-click menu doesn&#x27;t appear until you release the mouse rather than just when pressed. I do however acknowledge that&#x27;s an entirely pedantic issue of personal preference.