I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser for a long while, but lately I’ve noticed some issues that have me questioning whether it’s still the right choice:
Pinned tabs don’t always get restored when I close and reopen the apps.
Opening links from another app into Vivaldi does nothing if there isn’t a window already open.
Related to 2 above, a recent update claimed to have fixed that issue, but instead resulted in the app crashing. Thankfully they issued another update to resolve that, but my faith in Vivaldi has been shaken.
I absolutely love many of the features that Vivaldi has added over the last few years — web panels, translation, keyboard shortcut customisation — but I also want my primary browser to be reliable, and right now the team at Vivaldi are falling short. This makes me sad, because I want them to succeed so that there’s a good Chromium-based browser that isn’t under the thumb of either Google or Microsoft.
I like Vivaldi for the incredible amount of customization possible: I don’t think I have seen such extensive preferences in any other kind of software. However, it stays as backup to Firefox because of three things:
It is slower
It used to hog the CPU and had a helper process that took more and more CPU until the fans would run full blast.
It’s check for updates feature works once or twice after a new version, but then does nothing.
Now the last few versions of Firefox have had their issues too, so no browser is going to be perfect. Sadly, Safari is probably faster and better in all respects, but I’m not facing the web without proper ad blocking.
I’ve not had much issue with CPU usage by Vivaldi. Memory consumption is another matter, though sadly that’s the case whichever browser you use.
Ideally, I’d be able to use just Safari and be done, but I’ve had a few instances where for whatever reason I’ve had to fire up Vivaldi to get a particular site to work for me. I used to love Firefox, but I’m not loving the latest versions and have lost confidence in Mozilla’s direction of travel.
I’m currently using Orion, which uses the same WebKit engine as Safari but support Firefox and Chrome extension, and so far it’s working really well.
Very glad to read that you can now drop a link onto Vivaldi – I just tested it and yes, it’s true!
I’m not experiencing crashes (version 52, in Mojave), except that after I close its window, after a while sitting in the background the application quits.