lessons from trying out vivaldi for a week
Blatant reminder that I'm writing these as a user with no relation to what my employer thinks.
At the end of January, Mozilla decided to remind me that they know that people both love and hate AI, so they will continue work on AI. Incidentally, days later, Vivaldi dropped a new version of their browser, promoting it as focusing on adding good productivity features instead of AI. That is a very convincing message for someone like me! Good job!
And after about two weeks trying to replace Firefox with Vivaldi, because that's what followed, I have some notes from my experiences.
the cool bits
I think the funniest part was installing it for the first time and thinking "gee, this feels exactly like Opera did on my grandma's PC" (somehow grandma was the ~only person in the family using Opera, maybe still to this day, I'm not sure). There are some tiny touches in the UI that I really really liked, such as the turning (1) in tab titles into actual little (1) circles, or highlighting tabs that I haven't looked at since they finished loading, or the pinning of web apps to the sidebar panel, or even the bit where the top bar changes colour to match the current tab's accent (ok that one is very pretty but also very distracting to my brain. but still loved that tho).
I don't think I saw any problems with browsing websites, which I guess is expected when you're using the dominant web browser engine under the hood.
I haven't messed with tab tiling too much, but I'm now more convinced that it makes sense in concept, and if I needed to work on two documents next to each other I'd probably be using this more. The concepts of workspaces and stacks is where I got more confused: Firefox and Chrome got me used to the "tab groups" which intuitively map to stacks here, but I think as a closable thing that you can then reopen quickly they are actually more like workspaces. I tried both and I think they would be fun to have, but I'd need more time to get really productive with them.
I really liked the idea of the integrated feed reader. I'm currently in the funny situation where I've had Miniflux installed on my server for a few years, but I often forget to check it and clear up the backlog. Having it integrated into the browser with the little number of unread items popping up helps. One weird thing I spotted was that I couldn't spring up a sidebar of feeds unless I also enabled mail client, even though these two features are separately enabled.
And building on that, I think the reading list was somehow the coolest feature for me: an integrated place for saving articles for later that somehow felt much less obnoxious than Firefox's old Pocket integration. I did the most obvious thing, which is, save a bunch of long reads and then forget to come back to them.
the small annoying
The mail client: I honestly don't remember what exactly was wrong with it, but I configured it with one inbox, and then it did something that was worrying me, so I stopped it. That said, I'm not sure anyone can quite get what I want from a mail client. Fastmail's webmail is pretty elegant, but still not quite suited for my flow of almost being almost read-only, but with 10 different accounts, and a catch-all on 5 domains on one of them. Maybe I just need to build a mail client at some point.
Maybe the smallest one: when a webpage is opened as a side panel, the touchpad "navigate back" gesture acts on the main tab rather than the side panel. It's not a true deal breaker for me, but it remains in my memory now as a slightly yikes thing.
And coming back to the RSS reader, I appreciate that the side panel is there, but the UX of going through the items (which I think it's clear that it is the email UX, archiving items and what not) could use some improvement. I don't have an example of an RSS reader that has UX that I like — at one point I liked TTRSS, at another I thought Reminiflux was doing an okay job, but right now I'm thinking maybe I need to roll something custom to be able to go through large volumes of items at high speed (maybe that would also help with email hahah).
now for the actual deal breakers
I think I can name two concrete examples that are actionable, and a few more vague undertones.
First, I believe the recent changelog for the Android version said that external password managers are now supported. But somehow starting with that version Bitwarden stopped working (I only have vague memories, but I feel like it was working initially?). Opening it manually is still doable, but it's a big big slowdown when you just want to log in to some website.
Second, and this will sound funny probably: I have a flow with my gf where we watch video content together, which involves our custom Rust rewrite of Syncplay (with blackjack and that other thing), which opens as a TUI and we drag URLs to what we want to watch into that terminal window. Now, an endearing quirk of Vivaldi is that it intentionally breaks link dragging and the only documentation I can find for it is this article which is for telling website owners how to overcome this behaviour, if they feel strongly about it. I haven't seen a setting to control this, and it annoys me greatly, to be frank. That kinda sucks.
and the vague thoughts at last
The market for web browser engines is kinda limited right now. Almost everyone has hopped onto Chromium/Blink as base and Firefox/Gecko is The big competitor, assuming it hasn't been overtaken yet by Servo or, heavens forfend, Ladybird. I can imagine that it's a money sink for most companies. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I'd still like to support solutions that aren't indirectly supporting the status quo in this category.
The Bitwarden issue on mobile is probably the biggest factor to why I'm back to Firefox. I'd be perfectly happy with Vivaldi on desktop and Firefox on mobile, I think. But one trivial detail: these two browser brands can import one another's history and bookmarks at first start, but I don't think they can stay in sync. That these are perfectly understood by other browsers, but tied to whoever is offering sync for this browser – that's what grinds my gears a lot. Maybe I'm secretly wishing that we could have some neutral third party hosting this data with plugins providing the actual sync.
Which leads me to another area where I think browsers are still underdeveloped: setting sync. This is not a jab at Vivaldi as Firefox is also very inconsistent about it, but: if you're asking me to log in, I think you could at least remember that my default search should be DuckDuckGo (I really cannot live with all my !wen !wpl !wikt !allegro !ceneo !lb).
And at the end of the day, I enjoyed my time with Vivaldi. I appreciate that the company culture seems to be small helpful vibes. But I'm kinda questioning the business model, which seems to be deals with default search engines and default bookmarks and VPN, plus donations from users. That gives me Mozilla vibes, and after years of Mozilla focusing on the exact opposite of what I find likeable, I become anxious about giving this kind of unconditional support to a business entity that could change its mind at will.
i have to have conclusions??
make more browsers use less AI think outside the box hope we meet again
I liked the reading list and a friend talked to me about this type of software, so now I have Readeck on my server, which I'm sure will greatly serve the purpose of collecting long reads and never truly looking at them.