Opera used to be a fantastic web browser, with a custom high-performance Presto rendering engine and features like tabbed windows that didn't show up in competing browsers until years later. However, the modern Opera browser is a shadow of its former self, reliant on chasing trends and meme advertis...
It's a rebranded chromium with some extra bloat. Just like his older brother Chinese Chromium, Opera, and their edgy cousin, Microsoft Chromium. All following the example of Papa Chrome.
Not to mention it has the best ad and tracker blocking I've seen without extensions, I've never used UBO or anything and still have zero issues on YouTube with ads or performance problems.
Yeah yeah I know, it's still based on chromium, but until Firefox gets a suitable alternative to tab stacking and the side bar (ive already tried all of the solutions people claim is good enough or "the same" and find them all lacking) ill stick with V.
Yep. I daily drive Vivaldi on both macOS and Android.
I love it. The sidebar is a great feature; I stash my extension icons there. The theme is highly customizable; I have mine set to something similar to the Opera dark theme.
I don't use the email or calendar features. The great thing about Vivaldi is that they provide a ton of power user features, but don't shove it in your face. It's super easy to turn off the things you don't want and to turn on the things you do want.
I do use UBO, but they also have a builtin ad blocker if you want to use that instead.
The settings page is very extensive. Tons of customization. True to the Opera legacy!
That's what I thought until I installed Firefox with Sidebery and oh man, that's another level.
It required quite a bit of configuration make it really fit my needs, but when you configure it, it's incredible.
I keep revisiting Vivaldi once every few months, and get reminded of why I uninstall it within minutes. They remove the option of changing DNS servers from the configuration UI and moved it into flags. I have absolutely no idea why they do that, and its a philosophy I vehemently disagree with.
I loved some of the functionality Vivaldi adds (split tabs, tab groups, etc) but I couldn't take the instability that came with it. That thing crashed more times in the 6 months I used it than Firefox or Chrome ever have for me total I swear to god.
I love Vivaldi but it definitely chugs with the stupid amount of hibernated tabs I've got. The new sessions thing helped alleviate that a bit since I can save a window state and close it but I definitely run into some kind of memory leak with it. (I have had like 1k+ hibernated tabs open, so not entirely unexpected that it runs into issues but I'd still think if they're hibernated they should just be stubbed out tabs in memory until clicking one turns it into a full browser process. Idk)
Last I looked, I couldn't find a Linux version of Vivaldi. Which is strange as I'm pretty sure their beta releases did. Been a hot minute since I've looked again. Other than being chromium based, I liked what I seen. It's almost like kde developed it with its staggering feature set lol.