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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies in comparison with their Windows versions.
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.
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.
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.
> the second feature that I like in Vivaldi better than in Firefox or Chrome is that it accepts mouse gestures for most commands
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.
turns out i’d tried to be clever, set up a mouse gesture and forgotten about it. xD
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).
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.
A lot of people might think $20B is a lot to pay. But search (and “other”) account for over half (>$200B) the of Alphabet’s total revenue from all sources. It’s still a bargain when you consider how few people bother to (or are even aware of the possibility of) changing their default browser.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice work though and wonderful to see a 3rd party browser maker giving it a go.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
I'm not sure if this [1] is still relevant, but it appears that Vivaldi makes money by promoting search engines and bookmarks to their users via their closed source, secret, Chromium fork.
If my usage of their Chromium clone is being used to sell search engines/website bookmarks, then I am indeed the product.
There does also seem to be a VPN option on their site that I'm assuming I can pay for, which seems it could be an actually buyable product rather than selling my usage of their browser.
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.
Respect the tremendous amount of work that went into this!
I appreciate the intention to protect my privacy. How does that square with Manifest V2 deprecation as dictated by the adtech company (Google)?
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 :)
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.
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.
I understand if you want to stick with Firefox, but until Ladybird and co are ready for prime time, I'm sticking with Vivaldi.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Some want major version numbers to mean "giant changes" and others want version numbers to mean "not just a security patch". Others want something between.
None of these approaches is any more correct than the other and theres zero chance of getting everyone to agree only one should be used. You just have to understand which delivery approach is being taken to consume it accordingly.
E.g. 1.4.8, 14.8, and 148 all tell their own story. 1.4.8 implies many small releases with a few decent size changes along the way. 14.8 implies a medium speed (perhaps ~yearly) regular delivery if bigger enhancements with minor patches/fixes in between. 148 implies a long running continuous rapid delivery of all things as they become available.
I'm not affiliated. Happy user.
- Partner deals with search engines - Partner deals with bookmark partners - Partner deals through Direct Match - https://vivaldi.com/blog/privacy-without-compromise-proton-v...
How are integrated ads and dispatch of user data to third-parties sustainable sources of income?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies in comparison with their Windows versions.
Have been a Vivaldi user for many years.
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.
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.
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.
turns out i’d tried to be clever, set up a mouse gesture and forgotten about it. xD
Do they do any sort of third-party auditing of the closed parts?
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
* on my phone, can’t inspect the tars
I don't trust them one bit. There was that telemetry analysis that showed Vivaldi as a very noisy browser.
how so? how do you know this?
*screw Google and their AI search
So the answer seems to be:
- search partnerships
- direct match partnerships
- bookmarks partnerships
- donation
- cut when people sign up for advertised products (proton vpn, not sure if others)
Or at least that was the case in 2019
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.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...
Ah nevermind I see a chromium fork, I skip
I hope they keep it up.
Imo extension is the ultimate way to customize your browser experience.
It's not technical difficulties, there are open source projects that have such support.
I also don't believe it's against any TOS because some of these browser are available in the Google play store.
I just don't get why they refuse to do that.
If you don't have the ability to police extensions you're basically putting your users up for sale?
The problem you linked to also happened on desktop because there is no VSCode for phones.
Swap packages for extensions in the above and let me know how that's different
If anything, wouldn't a phone extension be more sandboxed than most desktop environments?
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.
Nice work though and wonderful to see a 3rd party browser maker giving it a go.
> You deserve better
Probably better to avoid (Chromium-based) Vivaldi then.
Then we need to have a discussion about that because in case of Vivaldi you are in fact not the product.
I'm not sure if this [1] is still relevant, but it appears that Vivaldi makes money by promoting search engines and bookmarks to their users via their closed source, secret, Chromium fork.
If my usage of their Chromium clone is being used to sell search engines/website bookmarks, then I am indeed the product.
There does also seem to be a VPN option on their site that I'm assuming I can pay for, which seems it could be an actually buyable product rather than selling my usage of their browser.
1. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
Wonder if the site dev was thinking of the astronaut pointing a gun at another astronaut meme when they put this in.
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.
Edit: details.
I appreciate the intention to protect my privacy. How does that square with Manifest V2 deprecation as dictated by the adtech company (Google)?
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 :)
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
Otherwise removing a few borders seems a bit underwhelming for a major version bump
I understand if you want to stick with Firefox, but until Ladybird and co are ready for prime time, I'm sticking with Vivaldi.
This major release bump is a bit disapointing though. Was expecting some more headlining features than just a bit of a UI clean up.
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.
It's also fantastic for tab hoarders like me.
can't we just have tabs + tiling (either tiles in tabs, or tabs in tiles, both can work), and call it a day?
that's all I need from browsing today
That's their thing. Though a lot can be disabled.
> can't we just have tabs + tiling
Maybe Min or Zen Browser is more your thing?
First release was 11 years ago. Why not?
Also there is no standard for version releases. I mean there probably is, but none that you have to follow.
> how can you trust closed source?
Same as using Android or windows or iOS.
None of these approaches is any more correct than the other and theres zero chance of getting everyone to agree only one should be used. You just have to understand which delivery approach is being taken to consume it accordingly.
E.g. 1.4.8, 14.8, and 148 all tell their own story. 1.4.8 implies many small releases with a few decent size changes along the way. 14.8 implies a medium speed (perhaps ~yearly) regular delivery if bigger enhancements with minor patches/fixes in between. 148 implies a long running continuous rapid delivery of all things as they become available.