Vivaldi First Look

Web browsers are such a key part of most peoples digital lives, that making the right choice for you is important, so I’m going to (starting with this post), I’m going to be writing a series of articles about different browsers; what they do well and what they fail at, and then at the end, I’ll write a conclusion article with a summary of my findings and my recommendations for different types of people (artists, gamers, Facebook users, content watchers, etc.). There are many browsers out there, majority of which are based on Chromium.

Lets start by talking about what Vivaldi claims to be; according to their website, they claim “A browser should adapt to you, not the other way around.”. I agree with them on this point, however scrolling further down on their site, they claim to have a community of volunteers making the browser, with “a healthy dose of browser-building expertise”, which is ironic seeing as they only created a custom GUI on top of Chromium. Now moving on, the features, one big thing I noticed about Vivaldi, is that it tries to do everything, be a web browser, email client, notebook, Mastodon client?, RSS feed, calendar and many more.

As a Linux user, the ability to install on Linux is a plus, and it is very customisable, it’s comparible to KDE Plasma or Linux as a whole in terms of the options available. I do like that, however it doesn’t offer certain options to customise the UI to be the exact way that I want. Now, I also don’t have a need for all of the bells and whistles that Vivaldi provides.

Now, to sum up, Vivaldi is full of features, implemented into the one app, available on all systems (from Windows, MacOS, Linux, to Android and iOS), it has decent default themes and recommendations for themes when you go to the store, as it’s based on Chromium it has the Chrome Web Store, but this browser is basically the Emacs of browsers, if that’s what you like, then sure, check it out, but for the general web user, it’s not needed, I’d recommend going for a smaller project like Brave or base Chromium. And that’s it for this blog post, so I’ll catch you all in the next one and have a good rest of your timezone.