Vivaldi

Firefox has been my default browser for the last few years, but recently I’ve been getting tired and frustrated with the direction it’s taking. There are design issues like those new disconnected tabs that irritate me. The lack of support for Progressive Web Apps is also a big issue: I might be part of a minority of users, but I use PWA for work all the time. Even the new design tools, like Figma or Miro, are web-based! And then we also have several controversies like this one.

The good news is that there are so many great options out there! And after testing a few browsers, I think I’m making Vivaldi my new daily driver.

Vivaldi is a browser created by some former employees of Opera (Opera was bought by a Chinese corporation in 2016), and it shares the same vision: plenty of options and features for power users, but flexible enough to accommodate beginners too. Some other things I like:

• Chromium-based without the Google creepiness.
• Since it’s Chromium, there’s PWA support. It works just like Chrome.
• So many features that you probably won’t need many plugins.
• Privacy-focused.
• The UI doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Thank you, designers.

It’s 2022 and there’s probably room only for three players in the browsers war (Google, Apple, and Microsoft), but I’d love to see Vivaldi gain some traction.

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