Switching to Vivaldi

The Web is part of our everyday life. That wasn’t always true. Depending upon who you are, and what you do for a living, there was time when you could opt out of the Web. A web browser is the essential application that gives you access. It’s the window you look through; the portal you enter. It’s the command dashboard you use to navigate your experience. The web browser you choose says something about who you are. Microsoft Windows users have Edge. Apple users have Safari. Linux users tend to use Mozilla’s Firefox. Google provides the Chrome Browser. Opera Software provides the Opera Browser. Vivaldi Technologies provides the Vivaldi Browser. I’m switching to Vivaldi. Allow me to explain.

My browser has been Mozilla Firefox for a long, long time. Before that, my browser was Netscape Navigator (yes, really), it’s predecessor. And before that, NCSA Mosaic. The key aspect of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, is its open source code base and belief in user privacy. Freedom-loving Linux users gravitate to Firefox because it’s open source. As a result, many Linux distros use Firefox as it’s default. People want the ability to audit the code base for ensure that there isn’t any shenanigans being added behind closed doors. Google and Microsoft are certainly adding things that people don’t want.

Depending on who you are, and what you value, people evaluate the same qualitative and quantitative attributes differently. For some people, it didn’t matter that Chrome was slightly faster than Firefox. The fact that Firefox is totally open source was more important. I was in that camp. Therefore Firefox is the right choice. Other people don’t care that Firefox is open source. Their logic goes: Chrome is faster, therefore better. I don’t like Google as a company. So I could never bring myself to daily drive Chrome. I haven’t liked what Microsoft has become over the last several years either. Their tactics used in developing Edge, are just as bad as what Google does with Chrome regarding telemetry and data collection. I’ve tried other browsers over the years. None of the them really … clicked. Until now. I’m switching to Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is my new default browser. Vivaldi has been around a while – longer than one might think. Version 1.0 was released on 6 April 2016. I’ve had it installed for a while. I played with it, but never gave it a fair shake. Recently, it has stepped up in the fight for the hearts and minds of web users. The Vivaldi Technologies CEO Jon von Tetzchner, made a promise to keep browsing human. With this, Vivaldi provides a place for people who don’t want AI in their browser. I was very glad to hear that. I decided to re-evaluate Vivaldi. Changing browsers isn’t just about the technology. It’s also about the company. While I love the Firefox browser, I can’t say the same about the Foundation. It’s not run well. Also, Mozilla keeps adding more AI features into Firefox. I don’t want AI in my all my tools. I want it as a separate tool, if at all. With Vivaldi, the source code is almost (95%) entirely open source. For some people, it has to be 100%, or they won’t use it. While I understand their thinking, I’d much rather have a company that behaves honorably, than a 100% open source code base. This is what Vivaldi Technologies seems to be, and that is why I’m switching to Vivaldi. It’s about more than just the code. It’s about people.

We’re an independent browser company based in Norway and Iceland. We believe the web is for exploring, and that browsing should help you to discover and chase ideas. It should light up your brain.
— Vivaldi “About Us”

What I’d really like to see is Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge users switching to Vivaldi. Instead of taking market share from Firefox, take it from Chrome. Bringing some balance to the browser market would be a great thing. While it doesn’t solve the browser engine diversity problem, people would notice the difference in user experience, using a privacy respecting browser.

Some Nice features

There are things about Vivaldi I didn’t really notice, until I started daily driving it. The bookmark search is wonderful. In Firefox I needed to add tags to make items more findable. Vivaldi’s bookmark search works better. I also like how it shows me the location of the folder that a result is in. Very nice. Another great feature is RSS support. It’ll show you when a site has an RSS feed available. As someone who has been getting back into using RSS over the last several months, it’s a welcome feature.

As someone interested in language learning, I find the Translation Panel very useful. I don’t have to open Bing Translate or Google Translate anymore. I copy foreign text from anywhere and paste it into Vivaldi’s translation panel, to see the answer. It also keeps a history of what you translated, so it’s easy to get it again, without re-searching.

Tabs, Tabs, Tabs

Vivaldi makes it easy to manage tabs. For those of you who have dozens of tabs open at any given time, this is for you. Vivaldi helps you bring some organization to your chaos. Workspaces has to be one of the biggest features. Every browser has a tab groups feature. But Workspaces, gives you an extra layer. So you have 2 levels of organization to work in. That’s pretty rad. Searching through tabs is great. It even help you search for recently closed tabs.

Syncing tabs across devices is one of the features I loved about Firefox. I paid for the privilege of using Firefox Sync. Having access to the same information across Mac, Linux, and iPhone is powerful. It’s so nice. Just after a few days of using Vivaldi, I like it’s implementation over Firefox.

Notes Panel

The Notes Panel is a great feature—one that I believe more browsers should offer. It’s not in Firefox or von Tetzchner’s prior browser, Opera. So this seems to be a Vivaldi-only feature. As a bonus, the text area supports markdown format. Since I’m an Obsidian user, my initial reaction was “Why would I use this?” It wasn’t until I tried to take notes watching a video, when it hit me. The ability to write notes next to the content while its playing is very powerful. The trick is to primarily treat is as a capture tool, and short term storage. The offline analog is using a pen to write in your Field Notes memo book. Once you’ve written all the notes about your content, then transfer to your main notebook. For me, that’s Obsidian.

Conclusion

More people need to use Vivaldi. What I wrote above, only scratches the surface. These are a few of the things I’ve really enjoyed since I made the switch a few days ago. Try it for yourself. Give it at least a week. I’m betting that if you make it your daily driver, you’ll be switching to Vivaldi before your know it. If you’re a Windows user, and your computer is about to be obsoleted by Microsoft’s decision to no longer support Windows 10 after 14 October 2025, you’ll want to look at the End of 10 website. You’re gonna need a new browser. So Download Vivaldi, and don’t look back.