Vivaldi Powerful Web Browser 17+

Right now on iOS, you can go with door #1, where the browser’s integration is all that matters, with the convenient side effect of stifling competition by forcing WebKit and disallowing extensions. Door #2 wants to gobble up all of your information and make as much money off of it as possible. Most of the rest of the doors are inconsequential, essentially offering nothing noteworthy and a bunch of ads. Oh, there’s one that values your privacy…but LOVES cryptocurrency. Enter Vivaldi. Somehow, ads are blocked and websites remain unbroken. Fantastic. They value your privacy as well. Sign me up. They offer syncing and very feature rich browsing experiences on desktop (including Linux). This browser is a fantastic choice. It can be an even better choice if you write your representatives and demand the freedom of choice that Europe now enjoys on iOS. Bottom line: this browser deserves your attention.

For a long time I was using Microsoft Edge for a browser, due to its easy navigation, but after it became too buggy, I decided to look for an alternative. Now as honest feedback, I wasn’t a fan of the earlier layout of Vivaldi, as it seemed outdated. But when I gave it another try, I was very impressed. The layout is much more modernized, easy to navigate, and the main menu looks very similar to the one in Edge. So it was no issue adjusting.

Also, Vivaldi has features that are not in other browsers for the iPad, such as advanced customization. I am usually very limited to the design options, and I prefer to surf the internet in style. With Vivaldi, I can change the tab color to any color I want, rather than just the typical white or black. I can change the app icon. I even have more options to my startpage than other browsers. The buttons are nice and large, and I have a Home button. Why do other browsers not feature all of this? I noticed that the loading time to pages is two seconds slower than Edge, but hey, that’s nothing.

My only complaint, as to why I give this product four stars, and not five, is that it does not seem like there is a way to import bookmarks and passwords from another browser. Brave has this feature, and it is just one of those things that save lots of time, rather than to create all bookmarks all over again. But aside from that, I really like what I see, and I decided to switch.

I tried to get back on Vivaldi, but after doing some workflow tests for my different jobs, I decided it isn’t quite there.

I can’t help but feel that using Chromium and Blink is seriously holding you back. On the other hand, most of the issues I note below are handled very well by Arc (which I reject for different reasons).

Tab management is annoying. Little things like not being able to restore a saved session into the active window, or not being able to load a saved session by default at startup for a given profile; not having meaningful tab groups; splitting up the related functionality of “saved sessions”, “profiles”, and “workspaces” in sort of arbitrary ways; quite janky tab stacks that don’t really approximate tab groups in Arc or Firefox…

UI animations feel rough, especially on mobile when switching between the active tab and the tab overview.

Multiprofile support is good, but the way it interacts with the user’s Vivaldi account is strange. Optimization requires logging into a different Vivaldi account for each profile (??). You can use it without doing that, but it’s janky.

When you make a new profile, there’s no way to have it import all the UI settings from the original profile without copying files buried deep in the Library directory (macOS), and that strategy also tends to copy bookmarks and other things that should be profile-specific.

Firefox works better for me. I’m sorry Vivaldi isn’t going to cut it.