I know we aren't allowed to use Chrome. We can't use Brave. But how does the Lemmy community feel about the Vivaldi Browser? or is it still not Firefox...
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.
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.
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 really not. Everyone just assumes they're the same because they have the same engine, but different companies are disabling and reconfiguring built-in features to the point where a developer like me really can't just assume "they're all Chromium so they'll all work just like Chrome in testing".
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.
Vivaldi Browser is not open source. Better use Brave than that…
If you still really hate Firefox, Ungoogled Chromium which is basically Chrome with all the Google stuff removed.
All of the above do still contribute to Google's monopoly, so I would really encourage Firefox or a fork.
Barring that, you could also get away with a WebKit browser (like GNOME web, Nyxt). Although WebKit is developed by Apple, it's still open source and doesn't look particularly bad. If you're on a Mac, Safari is an option, but it's closed source.
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.
I would say Vivaldi is my favorite Chromium browser, carrying forward the values of OG Opera from when I was a teenager. A browser for people who love to customize and want everything but the kitchen sink in one suite. Sadly, unlike Opera, which ran its own Presto browser engine, Vivaldi is somewhat leashed by Google, due to it running on Chromium. So I mostly use Firefox
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 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.
Note: while presently only available for mac, I would stick the Arc browser in the league of Vivaldi and Edge. While less customizable than Vivaldi, the level of workspace and tab management it brings are unprecedented.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Same. Tried it a few years ago and it was bloatware and cluttered. Took another chance on it and really like it, super fast and I can make it as full featured or slim down as I want. I think the company is owned by the workers if I remember correctly. Double check that
I started using Vivaldi when they finally added sync a d the sync is a thing I have the most problems with!
I randomly get duplicate notes and bookmarks if I edit some.
It always feels like ages until things get synchronized between devices (e.g. tabs).
There's this very prominent button in the share menu "Send to device" which doesn't work at all (I've read somewhere that it's a deprecated thing from Chromium, but why haven't they removed it for several years it's broken...?)
And also in past months it just randomly disconnected from the server several times on several devices, didn't even notify me except for changing the sync icon (on Android you have to go to the settings menu), and for a reconnect, I had to enter the passphrase again each time.
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.