cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/69330953
Hi guys, actually I was a hardcore Firefox and Brave browser user. Which means I have already used some powerful browsers available today.
Some days ago I posted a negative review about the Vivaldi browser, and another person commented that Vivaldi is not just a Chrome fork but more than that. So I thought, am I misunderstood about Vivaldi? Is Vivaldi really awesome and equivalent to Firefox and Brave? So I installed it and tried.
I am in Debian. In the native Debian repo there is no Vivaldi, but it’s downloadable from the official website as a .deb package. When we install the .deb package, it automatically adds the repo to the Debian repo list, so automatic updates are possible.
When I opened Vivaldi, it welcomed me with a welcome screen, and I needed to click around 6-7 times on the next button to land on the start page. I expected a minimal browser, and that’s ok; maybe it’s a part of customization. Then on the homepage there are some built-in bookmarks/speed dials. Maybe those are Vivaldi sponsors and partners. Vivaldi has to make some money to maintain the browser, right?.
The default search engine is startpage, which is very good. Btw, Firefox still has Google as default, which I really hate. There are lots and lots of options to customize the browser and make it ours, including sync to make the settings synced across platforms where we use the Vivaldi browser.
But the sync doesn’t seem to sync all settings, only some of them, also in extensions. Some extension settings, like SponsorBlock and dislike returns, are synced, but some other extensions, like AI Block for YouTube and Reddit Enhancer, have not synced across browsers.
I really want to talk about the adblocker on Vivaldi. Yeah, Vivaldi has an adblock and tracker blocker shield by default (turned off), but this is much less efficient at eliminating ads and cosmetic filtering on web pages. Somewhat in some popular news sites other than YouTube and Reddit, I still see ads and promotions. Also, the tracker blocking test online never gave me a 100% just with Vivaldi’s built-in blocker.
In such cases many extensions and filter lists come to help us make our web browsing more secure and faster. But recently installing and managing extensions on Vivaldi has become too hard. It’s also impossible to sideload extensions into Vivaldi by dragging and dropping CRX files. Also, when we are in the web store, there is always an annoying popup that says “Switch to Chrome.” Inside the setting, I turned on the brand browser as Chrome inside Vivaldi, so why is the pop-up still there? So finally, we have to download the zip file of an extension and extract it. Then, by enabling developer mode in vivaldi://extensions, we have to load it unpacked. But still, this won’t work effectively at all. I know it’s not intentionally done by Vivaldi, but Google’s stupid changes cause this.
Recently Google completely wiped MV3 from all Chromium-based browsers except ungoogled Chromium, Brave, Helium, etc., but Vivaldi is an independent company, right? Why does Vivaldi have to follow Google’s strict tricks to make advertising online more effective? Why shouldn’t Vivaldi make its own ad blocker more powerful, or instead of building it themselves, why don’t they consider making uBlock or AdGuard compatible with their browser? Finally, I figured out a way to sideload uBlock, but still it’s not working as amazingly as before.
So many will tell me to just use uBlock Lite, but even though uBlock Lite now has custom filter list options, adding 3 filter lists externally makes that extension crash only in Vivaldi. Then we reopen the extensions setting to see there is no filter list shown, not even the default one. Until we reset the extension settings completely, which removes the custom list we added.
Also in KDE (Wayland), the browser is working almost perfectly, but in GNOME I am unable to drag and reorder installed extensions on the toolbar by pressing and holding Ctrl. I figured out that GNOME has worse drag-and-drop support. But still, this works on every other browser like Brave, ungoogled-chromium, Helium, and Firefox, but why not on Vivaldi? Opening a support post on their forum didn’t even give a clear answer.
Finally, Vivaldi is a very good browser for productivity, customization, and more unnecessary control most people don’t need. But what about privacy? Do even they have anything in that browser to say the word “privacy” except an insufficient ad/tracker blocker? I wish Vivaldi and its developers would deeply look into its possible privacy protections on the modern web and ad/tracker-blocking capabilities.
Thank you.
No ads here, it’s easy to add custom filters to the Vivaldi blocker. You can sideload extensions and even User Scripts to the extension page with activated developer mod (Upper right corner in the page). Tip, you can add the extension page, same as other intern pages, to the web panel, so you can access these at any moment. The settings possibilities are certainly somewhat overhelming for some people, but if you want an granular settings it’s inavoidable. But if you had done it one time you have really the browser which fits 100% your needs, it’s worth this little effort.
Sideloading MV2 Extensions, doesn’t seems to work. If it’s a MV2 extension, then no need to sideload, can install directly from web store.
Vivaldi supports custom filterlists, but way less effective than even MV2 extensions. No cosmetic, network filtering like uBlock Origin does. Am saying so because vivaldi ad-blocker is not a brand new feature. It’s there for a longer time, but without any improvemrnts on it’s blocking rate or privacy things also.
Another thing is browser fingerprint, there is not a single way to harden vivaldi at all. Every data like operating system, timezone, canvas, audio, etc. can be easily fingerprinted. I used NoScript to atleast block third-party scripts but after blocking/unblocking a site in noscript webpage didn’t auto reload like in other browsers. We have to manually does it.
The web pannel, speed dials and customizations are standing out features, but those alone can’t be a reason to choose a browser in modern web. Vivaldi lags very behind in privacy and security wise.
Well, as said, I don’t see any ad, not even in YT and I use only the inbuild blocker. Fingerprint is not a simple thing, because some fingerprint’s are needed to show correctly a WebPage and don’t have any privacy problem. The webpage know the screen resolution, inbuild fonts, my OS and also the country from where I am (except if I use an VPN or Proxy). This are irrelevant data which are the same in millon other users. If I want I can block these, but with the price that a lot of websites not longer work or only badly. Privacy is important, but privacy protection means no leaking relevant private data, not to block tecnical data, to block tracking cookies (every adblocker do it, even the inbuild one from Vivaldi), no logging your activity as some browser and search engines (with these apart of a privacy problem it`s also a filter bubble problem) do and mostly also depends on the user himselve who is the biggest privacy hole in the web. You can go with a knight armor in the Jungle which keeps you complete save, but por obvious reasons its not the most usefull suite you can use.
brave is a no go for most people because of its facist politics. not only is vivaldi fully customizable, i had no problems synching or accessing tabs from other devices.
