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I know we aren’t allowed to use Chrome.
Who says? Use whatever you want, if you want to use Chrome then use it, nobody is stopping you.
As for Vivaldi, I personally think it's the best Chromium browser out there, highly customizable with all the good stuff from old Opera without none of the garbage from current Opera, plus it seems to be reasonably respectful of your privacy. Their only mistake was building it on Chromium.
I agree, I really liked its design and featureset. But after the third time I got a crash that deleted absolutely all browser data, as if it had been re-installed, I had to ditch it. It happened months apart, with no warning. I just open it one day and everything is gone. Not cool.
You can use any browser you want, just be aware of what the downsides are when you do.
The issue with Chrome and Chromium based broswers is the power that Google exerts over the internet via the Blink engine. Although other companies use the same technology, Google controls it and shapes it for it's own commerical gains.
The other big alternative is also proprietary with Apple's Sarfari and WebKit ecosystem.
Vivaldi is a nice browser but it is still run by a private company and it still monetises you to an extent. In vivaldi's case it is currently fairly inocuous - they have referral deals with search engines for the default search, and deals with companies for default bookmarks. But it seems to be currently a more trustworthy browser. Ultimately though, it is part of the Blink ecosystem and supports Google's increasing domination of the browser engine space.
Mozilla and Firefox remains the only truly independent browser, run in a not-for-profit and fully open source way, on the Gecko engine. It's existance helps maintain the neutral aspects of the Web - instead of sites being designed for one browser, it encourages web site and services to be truly standards compliant. Firefox monetise users in a similar way to Vivaldi but that money is used to actually maintain and develop Gecko and other Mozilla technologies, while Vivaldi use that money to maintain Vivaldi the company - they don't need to fund most of Blink as it's made available by Google.
But no one is obliged to support Firefox or open technologies. It's a personal choice what browser you use and there are many valid reasons beyond open standards to chose a browser. I use Firefox for multiple reasons; I genuinely like it and am used to it, but I actually also use Vivaldi and even Chrome on occasions (sometimes to view crapily designed ad heavy or tracking sites without having to disable lots of privacy extensions etc in firefox to make it work; I use Chrome as a bog standard sandbox when I want to dump crap sites out of my main browser but still want to quickly view it for whatever reason).
Pick a browser you like and don't feel guilty if that happens to be chrome based.
Firefox is the only good choice since everything else is built on chromium.
Two legs baaad, four legs good.
What about Ladybird, NetSurf, Flow, Pale Moon, Basilisk and K-Meleon? As far as I know no one of those is chromium based and they aren't Firefox forks either.
Bullshit. Plenty of other browsers based on other engines like WebKit.
It's chromium but has a special place in my heart because it's made by the og Opera people, when Opera used its own engine. I still use Firefox but if I ever switched it would probably be to Vivaldi.
It's all Chromium, the same browser.
Firefox still isn't chrome.
I know, i use firefox
Use whatever you want. But do consider if you want to contribute to Google's monopoly, and if you want to use an open-source browser.
It’s top on my list of Chromium browsers
When I started looking for a different browser, I almost chose Vivaldi. Then I discovered it was based on chromium os in the end I opted for Firefox
I daily drive Vivaldi.
The Android version is good too.
It's my daily driver on my phone. I have Firefox on desktop, but back when I wanted a more privacy focused browser on my phone too, mobile Firefox was still dogshit. I got vivaldi instead and haven't really felt the need to switch.
GNU Lynx is the only acceptable browser
Ignore the fanbois here. Vivaldi is solid. I will ditch it like an old sock if they end up having to adopt the new standards Google is pushing though. I'm confident Vivaldi will fight doing so until bitter end. I hope they are even willing to switch engines if needbe.
Vivaldi is now my main browser. Sync works great. The sidebar is awesome.
Vivaldi is fairly nice, but it's another Chromium. Similar to Brave, they've said they won't be including the Topics API, so it doesn't quite feed into the monoculture. (Disappointingly, they seem like they won't be disabling WEI, Google's latest land grab. Admittedly, for understandable reasons that mirror the original DRM for the web a decade ago, the blunt fact is that they seem like they'll go along with it anyway.) Considering the team is (supposedly) largely shared from some people that used to develop their own engine (Presto, before Opera switched to Chromium), I could also believe they could (possibly would) hard fork Chromium if they felt it necessary. If this is enough for you, then I'm sure you'll have a wonderful time with it, and I've enjoyed it well enough when I've tried it. Personally, I don't daily it.
You can use whatever you want, tbh, you'll just be judged. What browser is best really depends on what's important for you.
In terms of features and functionality, Vivaldi is on a league of it's own. No other mainstream browser can compete. Edge from Microsoft takes the second place (no, really). Everything else is far behind on third place. (I don't know about opera though, haven't seen it in a decade)
In terms of privacy, the picture is very different. Also depends on what you consider to be an invasion of privacy (is phoning-home bad? Is telemetry bad? Is allowing cookies bad?) some browsers do one, others do others. If everything is bad, then Firefox is the king here.
If you don't care about any of that and wants something that just works, maybe safari I guess?
Any recommendation you get here will usually take in account what the recommenders' think is important but your opinion might be different.
Ps: Chromium bases browsers don't necessarily pack in everything that Google does. Most of them are actually forks that still get to have a say in what they do or don't.
I use Vivaldi and it works fine for me. You can block ads and trackers and it's fast.
That's all I need.
I think vivaldi is respectful of the users privacy, and they are very transparent. If privacy is important to you, they have a number of settings which can be toggled to make it more private and secure: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/privacy-settings/
The rendering engine is chromium, and that's a deal breaker for some people. If you don't care about that, then I think it probably ranks right up there with Firefox.
Stay away from vivaldi , people recommending vivaldi has no idea
Since you apparently have ideas. What is the issue with using Vivaldi with ublock and/or some other privacy extensions?
Seems librewolf is the one to go for
Vivaldi has proprietary components that the developers will not disclose due to chronic fears of "corporate espionage"
Thus Vivaldi cannot be planted in a build farm nor be compiled yourself, so you have to take their precompiled binary and deal with it.
Stop being scared and use Librewolf and keep ungoogled chromium in the back for compatibility (and terrible nonfree "webapps").
Nonfree browsers are a waste of everyones time.
I personally love Vivaldi. It's really been the only browser for me that's met everything I wanted. Customizable, looks good. And has a whole synchronization suite as well.
I honestly just don't want to use Firefox at this point because I'm sick of Mozilla and their bad financial records (in 2021, the CEO gave themselves a 5 million bonus. And a good majority of their money still comes from Google), and the fact that they've kind of shifted their priorities away from Firefox in favor of more political activism activities. Which is annoying because Firefox is still the only other browser that has everything I need.
Yeah I do wish Vivaldi was fully open source but they've already mentioned that a lot of their stuff is besides their UI (which they're keeping private for branding reasons). I think Its kind of ridiculous, but it's not that big of a deal I guess since right now Vivaldi is just Chromium with an extra coat of paint.
I jumped ship from Firefox to Vivaldi back in 2020 for the same reasons. Not only did Firefox give some huge pay raises to their execs, but they also laid off tons of people at the same time. By tons of people, I mean like 250 all at once, and they only had 750 people working there total in 2020. Huge shame that they're just pocketing all the money meant for something important, to keep browsers diverse.
In my experience, Vivaldi has had superior customization and privacy settings, even to those in Firefox and Brave.
And about the UI code being closed source, from what I can tell, it's all minified JavaScript. So while they don't have documented code on GitLab or anything, anyone can still parse through it and run security checks on it if they want. Not perfect, but at least it's there.
I used it for a while and there I had to quit. It's just too buggy and instead of fixing the bugs in the updates they change your speed dial to include ads. It's fucking annoying and shows the devs are out of touch. The most egregious thing is when it just straight up deleted all my workspaces.
I've never seen ads but I disabled speed dial completely because bookmarks already exist.
It's the best Chromium browser. Company seems like it's run by decent people who listen to their users.
Wait what's wrong with Brave? Is there drama?!
Nothing, it's actually a very fine browser with a very capable adblocker.
EDIT: aaand instant downvote from Mozilla shills or drama queens lol
Thanks everyone for the feedback. I was using Brave but have been getting a bunch of people saying I shouldn't be (mainly referencing the founder). Currently giving Vivaldi a go, so far so good.
Definitely get your side panel set up, it's nice to have things like chathub, notes, and any website you don't need for long periods of time (I keep fandom wiki pages for all the crafting games I play like Valheim in the side bar for quick information on items and components.)
There's also the three different tab stacking options to choose from and a nice theme UI editor built in. As long as you chose block trackers and ads you should be pretty good on that without needing UBO. I don't see anything on YT and that's just with stock V.
I've been using it for a while because I like the forward and back arrows at the bottom and Firefox on Android was doing some weird stuff (freezing up and whatnot) at one point.
It's about the rendering engines, not the browser, really. More is better.
Fuck it, I use Brave, crypto shit isn't mandatory and all related features can be turned off, blockchain based sync is nice, because you don't need an email based account like other ones, built-in ad blocker is nice and they say they won't implement WEI (Google's website DRM) and I'm kinda reluctant to give a fuck about political values it's founder holds even if different from mine, certainly I'm not changing my habits because of that
Vivaldi is pretty good. Henry from Techlore seems to like it. Also, while it is proprietary, the source code is available to view, audit, and compile.
Firefox is fine. Chromium will be fine as well. If in doubt, pihole.
Vivaldi's pretty good feature-wise. It's got tab workspaces and stacking, detailed themes, mouse gestures, menu customisations, tab tiling, it's basically where a lot of the Firefox power-users have gone. It's a solid browser. That being said, a lot of the Firefox fanboyism is prevalent here so you're going to make a few people angry if you suggest anything that's based on Chromium. Just use whatever you see fit - I personally don't care too much about open-source vs. proprietary, I use Steam for crying out loud.
That being said, I've also gotta shill Pulse. I don't like the way Mozilla is running Firefox so I'm steering away from that, luckily Pulse is forked from Firefox. I'm concerned about Mozilla treating userChrome.css as a legacy feature, so having native vertical tabs is great, and a generally minimalist UI makes it a very clean looking browser to use. With Simple Tab Groups, the only extension I've installed for extra functionality with the browser itself, I've basically got my Vivaldi replacement, though If Mozilla breaks STG I'm moving my ass back to Vivaldi.
