After reading a few reviews I decided to try Vivaldi out. After importing my bookmarks and customizing my bookmark bar (just a little drag and drop) I was ready to go. Without trying any formal timing tests, my purely subjective impression is that things load faster. I don't have the tools or the patience to do formal testing so I'll wait for something official to be done later.

Like Brave, it is based on the Chrome engine, and as such supports extensions that can be found at the Chrome Store. My personal preferences are AdGuard AdBlocker, Google Dictionary, and HTML5 AutoPlay Disable. Settings are displayed much more conveniently than in Chrome, Brave, or Firefox. My only complaint was the way it handles pinch-zoom. On Brave, pinch-zoom works like most photo display apps. The whole display is zoomed with edges moving off the page, available by panning. On Vivaldi everything is made bigger and reformatted to fit on the page. Upon checking the Vivaldi forum I discovered that by going to

  • Settings
  • WebPages
  • Default Web Page Zoom

and unselecting Use CTRL-Scroll to zoom page, pinch-zoom now worked like I wanted. My initial impression is very favourable.

It's available for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.

dnBunnie commented: I'm using maxthon for over 20 years now, along with other browsers. Never felt the need to switch. But I'm curious +2

I like how it boasts on the splash page that it doesn't collect "excessive" user data.

"Excessive". Uh huh. I do understand that usage metrics, properly anonymized, could be useful. But I'd still like to know what is being shared.

BTW If you want you can have multiple tabs open in tiled mode. Not a feature I would use, but why not.

I've tried it pre-beta and V1, so quite a while ago. At that point it was a very fast and nice browser to work with (for me). Unfortunately, they began adding all the useless (non-developer) crap Chrome, FF and Opera had (which I don't use), so I ditched it.

Update: 7 years ago apparently:
https://www.daniweb.com/community-center/geeks-lounge/threads/491028/vivaldi

If you are referring to features like calendar and email, in the latest installer you can select to not install those features.

"Excessive". Uh huh. I do understand that usage metrics, properly anonymized, could be useful. But I'd still like to know what is being shared.

I just find it amusing that the single biggest thing they have to boast about (at least according to their splash page) has to include the word “excessive” to be accurate. If I was their marketing copy department, I would be looking for something else to brag about that doesn’t require any qualifiers. Especially sillily ambiguous ones.

Vivaldi browser provides excellent features to improve your productivity. The fact that it allows us to download and open attachments from web pages is highly appreciated. Apart from that, the personalized features are also great. Overall a wonderful browser.

I used Vivaldi 4 on different versions of macOS for about a year. Vivaldi 5 hangs too frequently for it to be useful to me. I've tried all kinds of tricks to figure out what's wrong -- logs, safe mode, no extensions, etc. Not sure what do to because I'd like to keep using Vivaldi.

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