All Linux Things

I was aware of Vivaldi browser, but never paid any attention to it. I installed a very ancient MacOS on a very ancient Mac. Safari had nothing but problems with certificates and ssl so I went looking to see what other browser might work and to my surprise Vivaldi still supported this old OS, so I download it and installed it.

It has so many features it actually scares me, and more than I will ever use so it seems very bloated. But damn it does not act bloated at all. In fact it is a very fast and nimble browser. For the sites I visit anyway the page loads seem more like files pulled of the hard drive rather than wandering in over the network.

A very nice feature for old eyes, is that it has a slider on the lower bar that quickly allows one to scale the page. It is very nice for old eyes. Another feature I like is a button beside the slider that always you to toggle image loading off and on. And of course it has ad blocking and tracking as well.

It is not open source and is not on flathub, but it does have deb and rpm packages available for almost any architecture. It looks like it should run on the arm64 based PineBook and the Raspberry Pi.

Yeah, Vivaldi was created by the ORIGINAL creator of the Opera browser. After he was bought out in Opera and they immediately turned the browser into an advertisement machine, he created Vivaldi based on Chromium. I've been a fan of it for quite some time, although I don't actually think it's the best of the Chromium based browsers for linux (oddly, M$ Edge actually holds that honor), but it's a good browser with lots of little features that make it nice to use. Although it's kinda the plasma of the browser world, in that it takes a LOT of time to know where everything is to learn how to customize it to suit ones tastes.

I also prefer Edge over Vivaldi in regards to best Chromium browser. That said nothing is going to replace Firefox as my main browser.

tlmiller wrote:it's kinda the plasma of the browser world

That is well put. It could make a better first impression as my first thoughts were along the lines of, "what have I gotten myself into." It is quite nimble at getting and rendering. As my eyes get worse I appreciate assistive aids front center and easy to find and the zoom slider visible and easy to use without looking through menus was a total delight. Plus the latest version of Vivaldi available for an OS discontinued and unsupported for 4 years is nice as well. Keep that older hardware going:)

Vivaldi is very customizable but most people actually prefer Brave as the two browsers get compared a lot. Ive never used Brave but many recommend it. Cant say how it does with older hardware.

I've used brave, personally hate it. While they've removed the unblockable ads (originally it replaced ads with it's OWN ads, but now you can opt to see no ads), it still has an adblocker built in that I just don't like as it has NO granularity of control. And you can't get rid of it, so while you can install a good adblocker, you'll just have to turn the built in one off, it'll still get loaded when you run the browser just won't do anything. IMO a very inefficient way of working.

Sounds horrible, glad I didnt try it.