cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/69330953

Hi guys, actually I was a hardcore Firefox and Brave browser user. Which means I have already used some powerful browsers available today.

Some days ago I posted a negative review about the Vivaldi browser, and another person commented that Vivaldi is not just a Chrome fork but more than that. So I thought, am I misunderstood about Vivaldi? Is Vivaldi really awesome and equivalent to Firefox and Brave? So I installed it and tried.

I am in Debian. In the native Debian repo there is no Vivaldi, but it's downloadable from the official website as a .deb package. When we install the .deb package, it automatically adds the repo to the Debian repo list, so automatic updates are possible.

When I opened Vivaldi, it welcomed me with a welcome screen, and I needed to click around 6-7 times on the next button to land on the start page. I expected a minimal browser, and that's ok; maybe it's a part of customization. Then on the homepage there are some built-in bookmarks/speed dials. Maybe those are Vivaldi sponsors and partners. Vivaldi has to make some money to maintain the browser, right?.

The default search engine is startpage, which is very good. Btw, Firefox still has Google as default, which I really hate. There are lots and lots of options to customize the browser and make it ours, including sync to make the settings synced across platforms where we use the Vivaldi browser.

But the sync doesn't seem to sync all settings, only some of them, also in extensions. Some extension settings, like SponsorBlock and dislike returns, are synced, but some other extensions, like AI Block for YouTube and Reddit Enhancer, have not synced across browsers.

I really want to talk about the adblocker on Vivaldi. Yeah, Vivaldi has an adblock and tracker blocker shield by default (turned off), but this is much less efficient at eliminating ads and cosmetic filtering on web pages. Somewhat in some popular news sites other than YouTube and Reddit, I still see ads and promotions. Also, the tracker blocking test online never gave me a 100% just with Vivaldi's built-in blocker.

In such cases many extensions and filter lists come to help us make our web browsing more secure and faster. But recently installing and managing extensions on Vivaldi has become too hard. It's also impossible to sideload extensions into Vivaldi by dragging and dropping CRX files. Also, when we are in the web store, there is always an annoying popup that says "Switch to Chrome." Inside the setting, I turned on the brand browser as Chrome inside Vivaldi, so why is the pop-up still there? So finally, we have to download the zip file of an extension and extract it. Then, by enabling developer mode in vivaldi://extensions, we have to load it unpacked. But still, this won't work effectively at all. I know it's not intentionally done by Vivaldi, but Google's stupid changes cause this.

Recently Google completely wiped MV3 from all Chromium-based browsers except ungoogled Chromium, Brave, Helium, etc., but Vivaldi is an independent company, right? Why does Vivaldi have to follow Google's strict tricks to make advertising online more effective? Why shouldn't Vivaldi make its own ad blocker more powerful, or instead of building it themselves, why don't they consider making uBlock or AdGuard compatible with their browser? Finally, I figured out a way to sideload uBlock, but still it's not working as amazingly as before.

So many will tell me to just use uBlock Lite, but even though uBlock Lite now has custom filter list options, adding 3 filter lists externally makes that extension crash only in Vivaldi. Then we reopen the extensions setting to see there is no filter list shown, not even the default one. Until we reset the extension settings completely, which removes the custom list we added.

Also in KDE (Wayland), the browser is working almost perfectly, but in GNOME I am unable to drag and reorder installed extensions on the toolbar by pressing and holding Ctrl. I figured out that GNOME has worse drag-and-drop support. But still, this works on every other browser like Brave, ungoogled-chromium, Helium, and Firefox, but why not on Vivaldi? Opening a support post on their forum didn't even give a clear answer.

Finally, Vivaldi is a very good browser for productivity, customization, and more unnecessary control most people don't need. But what about privacy? Do even they have anything in that browser to say the word "privacy" except an insufficient ad/tracker blocker? I wish Vivaldi and its developers would deeply look into its possible privacy protections on the modern web and ad/tracker-blocking capabilities.

Thank you.

So in your opinion Brave is good but Vivaldi is not?

Just need to let that sink in a bit..

I’m using Vivaldi as daily driver with fedora.
3rd party ad blocker.
It syncs for me and its privacy features work as far as I can tell.

Tried ecosia browser recently and like it but wouldn’t retain profile/sync after clearing browser data.
I might be clearing stuff that has nothing to do with browsing data but do same thing with Vivaldi.
I would use ecosia if sync profile worked like Vivaldi.

All browsers sux in their own special ways :)

Vivaldi is extremely bloated, and the syncing doesn't sync a lot of settings and often stops working altogether. But despite that, it's still the best browser I know.

I really wish they had options to turn off all the bloat (e.g. email, vpn, password manager, notes, translate, etc.). I'm sure many people, including myself, use a subset of those non-browser features, but there should be options to turn off the features we don't use (instead of just hiding the clutter).

Try Zenbrowser

Am not promoting Brave but saying what the drawbacks I found in Vivaldi when daily driving it. Sadly no browser is perfect.

Sorry, what are you trying to say? and what's with ecosia? isn't it a search engine?

Vivaldi isn't perfect by any means but there is also much more to it than the browser itself. Also if you don't like Vivaldi that's fine but stop using Brave :(

Ok but remember this is a privacy community and listing Brave is, well, not a good look

I went from Vivaldi to Zen, I much prefer Zen for the tab management, spaces, folders and essentials are fantastic.

I didn't say "brave" is a goat. I said Brave has some good features compared to Vivaldi. I also mentioned ungoogled Chromium and Helium, which seems like it didn't catch your eye. Only you noticed, brave, right? Good!

I don't get the Brave hate. I use it on mobile and it works quite well. The ad blocker is good, I can browse YouTube ads and I can listen to it even if the screen is locked.

Ecosia has a browser these days, and I would use if sync profile remained active after clearing of session data.

And for me, Vivaldi works well enough for me to use on a KDE desktop.

This is how people should review stuff, its a rly gud analysis pointing out pros and cons

You can also try others like Floorp.

Vivaldi is proprietary so it's worse than free options, including Brave.

This isn't an endorsement of Brave, since there are better free options as well, such as Helium for Chromium based browsers, or LibreWolf.

From my understanding brave is decent for privacy (not great. Just decent). It has a lot of issues though with the founder being a right wing supporter who has opposed human rights and had some covid opposition. It also has had issues like when you used the inbuilt tor system it leaked DNS queries making tor a little useless and ruined a lot of faith people had in them to make decent privacy software. It has also been very cryptocurrency forward. It also stole crypto from a few people through a "bug". Basically it isnt that brave is currently proving they are a shit browser but there are several issues in the past and controversies that make most privacy focused people not trust it.

It's nice it has a VPN for when you need it. I rarely use a VPN so you don't need to install one seperately. But yeah the adblocker isn't great. I wouldn't use it as a main browser but it's good for when you need a Chrome browser. Not sure what you mean it's got unnecessary control, more control is better.

Firefox with uBlock Origin on mobile does that too. That said, I do use Brave on mobile when I need a Chromium browser and the Chrome Mask extension doesn't cut it.

The VPN is not its own. Vivaldi partnered with Proton VPN. The company always offered free servers at unlimited bandwidth. So all the appreciation goes to Proton. Also, when you are clicking on the VPN, it auto-installs the ProtonVPN extension from the Webstore and says you need to sign in. I mean, it's not too hard to search and install ProtonVPN from the webstore. For me, that VPN icon does not look like a wonderful thing done by Vivaldi.

no matter how many controls it gave. Everything always feels half-baked. For example, why can't Vivaldi read web page contents like Edge does?

Ecosia has desktop browsers too? I have never heard about it at all. Anyway, I am not interested in that company at all.

They claim to be environment friendly by planting trees and still uses AI. That's really weird.

Seems it’s not bad and fares better than most.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/

https://privacytests.org/

Vivaldi is made by former Opera guys and deserves zero attention because it is yet another proptietary piece of crap.

Vivaldi is closed source and about as trustworthy as a USB stick you pick up on the street.