There is a good interview with Vivaldi founder on Tedium [1] where he basically says that because most browsers are built on Chromium nowadays, you have to innovate on features and that is the direction they took. And really the number of features in Vivaldi is staggering including some great ones like Tab Stacking and Tab Tiling.
But adding this many features took a toll on performance and it is about 25% slower than other Chromium based browsers. Also I assume that is the reason why is there no Vivaldi on iOS.
To be more accurate there are no Blink or Gecko based browsers on iOS. Both Firefox and Chrome (and many other Chromium browsers) exist on iOS, using WebKit rendering engine.
Technically correct, but the Firefox and Chrome listed in the iOS lockdown store are basically just skins on top of WebKit, not actually different web browsers (like they are on Android and other modern operating systems).
It sounds like the EU and others may be fixing this soon by forcing Apple to allow other app stores on their devices if they want to continue selling devices in their regions.
Presumably Amazon store / Epic store / etc on iOS will carry real Firefox / Chrome.
What do you mean by skin on top of WebKit? WebKit itself just renders the web page. The browser manufacturer has to build an entire browser and decide how to treat user privacy for example, does it have telemetry and what kind, whether to use native controls or not, what browser features to implement like reader mode, how to handle multiple tabs, gestures etc.. Calling that a skin is same as calling Vivaldi a skin of Chromium disregarding the effort made to make it different.
Well... Yes, Vivaldi is a skin of Chromium, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of effort going into that skin.
The point is that Firefox and Chrome on iOS are not the same browser as Firefox and Chrome on any other platform.
For example, if I get a bug report from someone saying they're using Chrome on mobile, if they then say they're using iOS, that's a whole different kettle of fish from any other Chrome bug report I might get. It's going to be much closer to a Safari-related bug than a Chrome one, in a conventional sense.
For it to be a "skin", there would need to be a default "skin" to "reskin". WebKit has no default 'skin' becase it is just a web view. If you make an app with WebKit you have zero browser features, not even an address bar to type an URL into.
Skin, UI, I take your point, but the point being made elsewhere is not about the semantics of "skin", but the fact that the underlying browser runtime and renderer is not the same between iOS and other versions of browsers. You're unlikely to find a bug report that is caused by the UI of a browser, rather than the runtime.
Is the UI still as horribly laggy? I try vivaldi every other year because people say it's faster, but it's almost as if those people only run that beast on a desktop or fully specced 15" laptops
If anything, Vivaldi seems faster for me than Chrome was. I haven't seen any of the performance slowdowns that other people on this thread have mentioned. Possibly because I haven't enabled the Mail/Calendar/Feeds full-fat option?
Runs fine on my nothing special 6-7 year old computer. I also disable tab rendering and use the tab side panel instead, I'm not sure if that makes a difference.
I see. If you're willing to give it another try, perhaps try and customize away all the fancy bells and whistles (for example I disabled tabs altogether and just use the side panel for displaying the tabs but I'm sure there's other settings as well).
So i just tried it actually, and it's way better than it used to be. Still a bit laggy, but i think I would consider this usable. I do however still see couple hundred ms delays on clicking on random ui elements even after disabling animations.
I'm in the same boat. I've wanted to switch to them for years, but once I get it loaded with my requisite plugins and start using it for a while, the UI inevitably begins to experience random lags and moments of unresponsiveness.
I've had some websites that wouldn't load properly and I had to fallback to firefox. (Prior to today, I was using 3.5. So hopefully that has been fixed)
Exactly what I was going to ask. They wrote the UI in javascript with obvious consequences. The day they rewrite it in a normal language they will see me again.
Author of that piece—was great chatting with Jon von Tetzchner. FWIW, I daily drive it on an M1 MacBook Air now that there’s a native Apple Silicon version and I don’t really see the slowdown issues.
Also, his recommendation in the piece of creating a minimal profile is one that I think a lot of people might find valuable when using Vivaldi.
I've been using Vivaldi for a few months now and basically forgot about Firefox.
1. Address Bar abd Tabs in the bottom without having to hack Firefox XUL/CSS.
2. Tabs. I have 7-8 stacks at any point. For example, I can start reading HN articles, leave the tabs open and them move to another stack for work, research, whatever. I have around 100+ tabs open at any time (and they consuming a little over 12Gb of memory). The tabs stick at restarts.
3. Email. Simple notifications. Useful since I'm running on Arch with no desktop/notifications, etc...
4. Chromium. I'm sorry but as of right now it's better than Firefox Quantum.
It gives you the option to hide all tabs that aren't in your current container. The other advantage it gives over tab stacks in Vivaldi / Edge / Chrome is that they're actually containerized. Tabs in container A can't access anything from tabs in container B.
Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton of unnecessary cognitive load that 0.1% of their users will find useful. Browser design by committee.
There's a lot of browsers out there that already give the experience you want. Like Ungoogled Chromium (or regular Chromium).
I always see a lot of power users being enraged to other browsers when they remove features that the 1~5% of their users use so it's a bit weird to see protests against one of the few browsers that attempt to reverse the oversimplification trend.
Vivaldi's main deal is allowing the user to customize most of their browser. Themes, buttons, custom CSS, even side menu options. Even if they have improved it quite a bit there's still a performance hit.
I use Safari for actual browsing because it's really unbeatable at it - very fast rendering, has tabs. I'd argue Chromium doesn't quite live up to that promise thanks to the horrible UI rendering and spectacular battery drain that it inherits from Chrome. Firefox I think does a nice compromise between being a good browser and having all that customisation stuff that the kids seem to like, but it does have a tiny hit on performance there too, ie: when opening a new tab the UI lag is as bad as Chrome. Vivaldi takes it to an extreme, and obviously gets the extreme UI lag that goes with that.
I'm probably in a minority, but for me anything that gets in the way of me opening a new tab and loading a webpage in it is just harm.
Safari user here too. It's great. Admittedly, I'm fairly invested in the Apple ecosystem and enjoy my laptop and phone operating as two views on the same computing state, so I'm biased... but Safari renders very nicely, has minimal UI, runs fast and I like it a lot.
I'm not looking forward to the Monterey tab design tho' when I eventually have to upgrade to a "current"-ish version.
I'm on the Monterey tab design, and it's hit and miss. First time using it I was wondering what the fuss was about wrt knowing which was the active tab, it seemed fairly clear to me. However, I've since seen states where the active tab is lighter than the others (it is right now) and other times where the active tab is darker than the others (definitely happens in a private window) - the lack of consistency is the biggest problem with it. Also, it's _really_ hard to tell if you're in a private window on the latest Safari.
The chrome color-changing is obnoxious and plainly harms UX, and the design is weirdly wasteful of pixels for something that looks like it was intended to save space. It also continues the flattifying trend of making it impossible to distinguish individual interactive elements unless you're looking directly at them—gimme buttons, depth, and contrast, damnit.
And that's after switching it to the more-classic-like version that keeps the URL bar separate.
The tab groups are sort of cool, but they're bugged for me (opening a link in a new tab results in a blank tab, after briefly displaying the intended content after I switch to it, but only in named groups, not in the default unnamed tab group) and their relationship or lack of relationship with windows keeps throwing me off. Overall this feels like something the window manager should handle, in some fashion, though I admit existing features aren't quite enough to cover what it does. It also seems like the whole concept needs to be integrated with bookmarks. All in all, good direction, but something's still missing.
Oh, and I also forget to switch to them, so haven't used them at all since about the first week after initially setting a few useful ones up. I need a way to at least tell Safari to open tabs for certain sites in certain tab groups, regardless of where I start to load them. Otherwise I end up with the same 100+ tabs in the unnamed tab group as I always have.
The new tab design is entirely optional on Monterey, the reception to it was that bad. I personally don’t use the new tab design on the desktop. But I do use the new tab design on iOS (which conveniently moves the address bar to the bottom of the screen)
As an iPad owner, Safari is great, it does the job for occasional browsing, displaying things to someone (small gatherings, meetings, family, etc).
As a Linux Desktop user however, I don't care about UI speed since my browser usage is mostly static, a few documentation pages, a lot of heavy tabs at work (JIRA, Gmail, Chat, Teams, web related projects, etc). Maybe I have a powerful desktop bias since my Ryzen doesn't seem to have any visible performance hit, either Chromium, Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi open tabs in a flash. On my laptop (also Linux) every browser feels a bit sluggish though with Chromium being the fastest. Macs (specially the new M1s) are a different beast and feels like Safari is specially optimized for them.
I love Safari, too - my issue is that I use different OS's in parallel and not having bookmarks/settings sync is a big usability issue :/ so I'm stuck with Ungoogled Chromium, where I can at least solve for the bookmarks sync.
> making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been.
Everything you think you gain in speed in Chrome/Firefox, you instantly lose when having to deal with their oversimplified UX.
Vivaldi's focus on features means that I can easily manage and switch between tens of tabs - having an equivalent functionality on other browsers via extensions is both very slow and clunky, and the simple act of switching between two tabs is annoyingly unergonomic. By using Vivaldi I must've gained so far entire days of life that would've been otherwise lost by blindly ctrl-tabbing my way to the desired tab.
Switch browsers then, you have alternatives. Nothing wrong with what they do, this is not the way to appreciate free stuff. We're not in 2003 when IE was your only tool.
Are we offended by too many options now? I want a rendering engine with adblocker and a mail client blended in. Most of my time is spent in a browser when I'm online so, for me, it makes sense for my browser to be as capable as it can.
That's the sort of attitude that's ruining Firefox. They're removing everything that makes it useful in a appempt to turn it into a Chrome clone. Vivaldi is the only remotely viable alternative to Firefox.
I've been using Vivaldi for at least a couple of years now - strictly for banking - and I fully agree on the slowness of the application. It's awful.
I came from the original Opera (before it transferred ownership) and I loved the UI/UX and performance of it. I was hoping Vivaldi would replicate that, but it's been an enormous pain in the ass lately with websites either not loading (they work fine in Firefox and Chrome), tabs crashing spontaneously, the app crashing spontaneously, and the horrid performance. These issues seem to occur across my different other laptops also.
I use it exclusively for banking as I said, so it's only used once or twice a month but I would never use Vivaldi on a regular basis with the way it currently works.
I will say though, I really like their mobile app so far. There was a weird tab duplication bug on it earlier in the year and they fixed it really quick, but outside of that it's been pretty great.
On top of that, their open core model makes it hard to say how secure all that UI is and how pro-user they actually are. In that phone-home test they had some of the worst score n that regard, together with Edge.
Maybe an angle to getting a size-able slice of the browser market for a start up at this point would be just being super simple, very private-first, and than have a better development experience + inspector than Chrome's. Then let all the "tech" people push it out. No easy task.
Even tabs don't have to be a thing for an app (e.g. a web browser) to manage. A good window manager could tabify anything. This would require a standardized API for windows to expose the opened view URIs to be really good in replacing app-level tabs though.
That was an interesting read, I was not aware that we got this info from the horse's mouth.
Vivaldi has been criticized because it appears to phone home a lot. I've not tested that myself, but I assumed it was true. I might give it another shot because I do enjoy its Opera-like feel over Chrome or Chromium.
Vivaldi is not just another repackaged Chromium, it has it's own completely custom UI and special features. For example, it has built-in mail, rss, calendar, and contacts "apps", and a built in screenshot tool that lets you capture an entire page or a single element.
Features like that are why you would want to use Vivaldi over another Chromium-based browser. I don't even know if they actually went through the effort of a thorough de-Googling. Also, their custom UI is not open source, so the browser is partially proprietary.
"Speed improvements" in every release but there must be something about the way the browser is implemented that just kills performance/efficiency vs other Chromium browsers. Even a basic test like Speedometer 2.0 shoots out that DOM manipulations are 75% the speed of the same benchmark on Chrome, what on earth is it doing to cause that?
The interface is great but between performance and bugs I've never been able to stay on it for more than a couple of months.
The UI is written in React, and apparently runs as a sort of an extension to chromium[0] according to a Vivaldi dev. I expect that would be a large source of performance decreases with a JS powered UI. It's certainly an impressive UI though.
That explains why I get beach ball of death in my macOS. Sometime it just hang indefinitely and I was wondering why this behavior exist in Vivaldi. I thought it was a bad memory leak.
That's where I pulled the 75% result from just now, not sure if it's as systemic as it was originally as that's where I gave up bothering to test further this time.
It's fine on my 4-core Haswell Xeon desktop but I really notice the lag on my Haswell 2-core laptop. I suspect there's a bit too much Electron-type stuff in the UI.
It's a small price to pay for a browser that lets me configure the UI the way I want it. If Chrome supported tabs on the side as well as Vivaldi, even with an extension, I might not have switched. The rest of the configurability is just gravy for me.
Look at Firefox now for an example of what happens when developers can introduce their "I know best" themes:
I constantly get confused and think the active tab is next to the actually active tab.
Irony is the idea behind removing actual themability seems to be to prevent people from seeing badly styled browsers, and yet this is the second most annoying one I am aware of. (Chrome annoys me more, not because it is bad but because I don't like Chrome ;-)
Firefox color is different from the new built-in color thing. It’s an official extension that has been around for a while which lets you customize a lot of the colors used in different parts of Firefox.
There is a bigger group of users that care about how cute/fun/whatever their browser looks than the group of users that care about engine improvements and new technology support.
Users like it, especially if you can customise it. (Winamp comes to mind - themes were a huge deal with it and one of the reasons behind its popularity). And it also generates a lot of community activity around the software, which adds value and provides free publicity.
Agreed… there’s very little surface that isn’t taken up by the website, so it makes far less sense than, say a terminal. It’s a uniquely bad fit for theming.
A useable method of styling webpages, however, would be quite interesting. CSS just doesn’t quite work when used generically on all sites, except for maybe font sizes. Chrome’s in-beta automatic dark modes are maybe one working example.
I’d appreciate, for example, some way to make better use of the 6000px of screen width I have. Unfortunately, with mobile-first and portrait-mode prevalence, the trend seems to be going back to optimizing for 800px.
As far as just colors and font size and such, that used to be an OS feature that every (native) application got for free.
FF had it years and years ago, too. I tried it a bit back then and then stopped, because almost all the themes just made it harder to use. Not sure what's up with their making such a big deal out of adding a weaker and less-customizable version of it recently with their color themes. "We redid an old feature, but worse".
I wondered about that too. It seems like a bit of "filler content" to be honest. There are not many new features at all, the new thing here is the theme management in first place. The release notes in general are pretty weak compared to pervious releases of Vivaldi.
I mean I don't care there is always a bit of a hanger now and then, I still love Vivaldi. Just saying I can relate to these observation.
I think Chrome handles themes best, at least on Linux. It automatically grabs your GTK stylesheet's color palette and recolors the window accordingly. Combined with proper window decorations, it's a surprisingly "native" feel out of the box.
I once liked Vivaldi. However, a few months ago I started to dislike it, since it adds more and more useless stuff instead of being innovative:
* Graphics RGB color diagram
* Mail client
* Calendar client
* Since over a year I can't play back video, that ha audio, because then the browser hangs for minutes.
* Theme editor
* Philips Hue integration
* Razor Chroma intergration
* (sophisticated) time based theme changes
* built in Vivaldia computer game
and these were just the things I found in the first four settings categories... Oh, Notes comes to mind... that doesn't belong into the browser, it belongs into a separate application...and so on...
Yes, the tabs are nice, the quick command (F2) is nice, there is a few other things (it doesn't crash, which is a big one!) but the only reason I am still with it, is, that I have already stored so much information in it and I am too lazy to switch.
Agree with the bloat issue, I use Vivaldi because tab tiling, which is unique to this browser, but the additional functionality seems like it will become a crippling maintenance burden for a small team. I get that Tetzchner is trying to stand out in a sea of Chrome clones, but things like the Hue bulb integration and especially the not really fun or interesting embedded minigame are particularly egregious examples of things which are just wasting time, as well as introducing bugs and attack surface. Just shows a lack of discipline from the product management. Make this stuff an optional extension or something.
i've been using vivaldi for the past 3 years, and it's fantastic.
i really like the customizability, the stacked tabs feature, the builtin rss reader (which by the way, lets you subscribe to youtube channels!). really hope they make it, because the thought of going back to chrome makes me shudder now.
Congrats on the release! I like this browser a lot; it's a comprehensive, battery-included solution.
If they supported Firefox-like multi-account containers [1], it'd switch entirely to Vivaldi. Their tab grouping is really good, the session separation is the only thing missing here. :)
Vivaldi is easily the best browser I've ever used, bar none. But for lacking two-factor authentication on the account itself, I have no complaints - the vertical tabs, web panels, bookmark tree, and the Human theme are unrivaled by any other browser.
I didn't discover Vivaldi until recently, but I'm a fanatical convert now. Strongly recommended.
Hands down the best browser I've ever used because of their customizability and speed, and the support on their forum is swift and effective. Moreover, the developers are staunchly against crypto“currencies”. Seldom, some websites break, but that's because I extensively use uMatrix.
The ability to set texture beneath tabs bar and have it colored according to either theme color or site accent color remains still broken, since few major versions already. Shame because I really liked that little feature; despite of my reports, nobody dared to see what's up with this issue.
Overall, it's a really good browser that fits my needs with few extensions. I've moved to Vivaldi after Firefox released version 60 - my heavily customized profile was damaged beyond recovery; luckily I had already bookmarks backed up and passwords stored outside.
1) I asked this previously but is it really that difficult to take a screenshot on Windows?
"Vivaldi’s built-in Capture tool lets you capture either a Full Page screenshot, or a Selection of the screen that you define. It can be accessed in a number of ways through the Vivaldi UI to give you flexibility in how you implement the tool."
2) The fully loaded version of the browser comes with a mail client, calendar and contacts. Didn't Netscape Navigator already show us that this confluence of features was a disaster for a browser?
> "Vivaldi’s built-in Capture tool lets you capture either a Full Page screenshot, or a Selection of the screen that you define. It can be accessed in a number of ways through the Vivaldi UI to give you flexibility in how you implement the tool."
Not difficult, it is the limitation of the OS. Desktop OSes don't have a way to tell the browser to take a screenshot of the full page. So it is limited of what it can do. This is where Firefox and Vivaldi comes in, they provided the tools that allows them to scroll the entire page internally and take a screenshot. If there is a website with 5 pages, the OS only can take a picture of what is actively displaying. The browsers itself can barrow deeper to get a full pages.
There is one issue I have with Vivaldi Capture, it seems to capture the webpage with lower DPI than OS capture tools. Windows and macOS capture tool looks crisp and clean. In Vivaldi, it is not crisp and I have a hard time to read the text in it. Not sure if they improve it lately.
I think the point of that feature is to take a screenshot of the full web page, even the part that is currently scrolled out of view. That's not something that the OS screenshot tool can do.
Taking a screenshot on Windows is easy. PrtScn key will copy a screenshot of the current screen to the clipboard, Alt+PrtScn will copy the current window to the clipboard, Windows+PrtScn will save a screenshot of the current screen to the Screenshot folder of the Pictures folder. Additionally, Windows ships with the Snip & Sketch tool which is activated with Windows+Shift+S. It allows you to capture a whole screen, a window, a rectangle or a free form area of a screen. It also has tools for annotating the screenshot.
Yes! The ability to hover over parts of the DOM and grab screenshots is a big upgrade from the built-in OS functionality on Mac and Linux, since it removes the fiddling I normally have to do to grab the optimal region. I don't use Windows, so I'm not sure about the comparison there.
No container support? It was the most requested feature. I use vivaldi instead of brave when firefox fails to support website. But having no container is kinda sad :(
A speed chart on the Downloads panel? The same reaction I had when windows 8 added a chart for file copying speed: who cares?
I get that there are nerds who like a number for everything. Just a speed number is fine, but almost no one just sit there and watch a live chart of file copying/downloading speed, as if they have nothing else to do with their computer.
I wouldn't be surprised if that because Vivaldi had/has a corporate MS service using the domain in some way. E.g. if I test with one of my personal domains with MX records/email configured it continues just fine, if I test with one of my personal domains without email configure it continues just fine, if I try to create a personal account using my work's domain (tied to O365) it blocks it.
So it's not that you can only register gmail/yahoo/etc it seems that the domain can't already be registered for non personal use at MS. Maybe there are other criteria as well (perhaps a way to explicitly exclude your domain if you don't want people registering it for example) but it's a lot more open than "only these services allowed".
Doesn't necessarily have to be that the domain is tied to specifically O365 like my work just that it is registered for non-personal use with Microsoft's cloud e.g. Azure AD. Or possibly still other factors unknown but yeah the main thing is it's blocked for a reason not because it was missing from a whitelist.
This seems to be a new trend - even IBM doesn't allow you to create accounts with non-American / non-BigTech email IDs (for their free cloud offering). Makes you wonder what is going on behind the scenes.
The Linux foundation is in the same league: They are sending me spam^Hmarketing communication, but when I want to unsubscribe they tell me that I have an invalid email. The provider of that address ended up on some self-declared blacklist years ago for some time, which might explain part of it. But not stopping to sending email to those you don't want to deal with is nonsense. Not accepting unsubscribes probably illegal in many countries.
What's going on behind the scenes is that very few people don't use an email address with one of a handful of TLDs, and that restricting signups to a known-good list solves some support and a lot of abuse problems.
Not saying it justifies it, but that's for-sure one reason places do that.
I don’t think it’s anything against competition, just that they don’t have vivaldi.net on their public email allowlist. They want enterprise customers to pay for enterprise Microsoft services.
IMHO it's a dumb policy and against competition. This is discriminatory and abusive.
Pretty sure there are thousands or tens of thousands of email domains out there that are personal. Nobody can track them all. How many of you guys don't have your own personal domains?
Pretty sure that's no longer the case or used to not be the case as I have a Microsoft account I use on Skype among other MS services that is firstname@lastname.fr
Honest question, how is FireFox becoming unusable for you? I am using it on both Linux and Windows and do not really have any problems with it. Sure, sometimes a web site does not load properly but more often than not is because some add-ons like ad-blocker and no-script are intervening for me. In other cases, its obvious that the website was never tested in anything but chrome. In those cases where I really need it, I have some chromium-based browser as backup on all my devices. But daily work on FireFox is just fine for me.
Your comment reminds me of how people were complaining for a long time that FireFox had become so slow, while I was browsing with multiple dozens of open tabs on my 8GB system all along. I do not want to say that this is not the case for you, but I honestly cannot reproduce it on three different laptops.
Agreed, it has been my daily driver for years and I have never had any problems with it. I think the guy your replied to is just riding on the Mozilla hate train.
To be fair, Mozilla does deserve 99.999% of the hate it gets, but that doesn't justify making dishonest claims about Firefox just to stick it to Mozilla.
I'm also curious about this. I finally upgraded from a 4GB RAM system to something modern, but FireFox was my primary on that machine for years with no issues. Firefox mobile has atrocious performance for me, but their desktop app is solid and it's what I'm viewing HN on right now. I especially love the silent updates.
EDIT: by "modern" I mean I'm on an I5 with 8GB RAM lol. I do have a Lenovo Legion 7 with a 3080 but use it only for gaming. This I5/8GB combo is my daily driver and works great with Firefox, loads instantly and I can have a dozen or more tabs open no problem.
With Firefox 93, I was restarting the browser 3 or 4 times a day because it kept crashing while playing videos. It would start with videos loading but not playing, and then moments later the whole browser would lock up and leave no choice but to kill it and restart. So far Firefox 94 seems to have that issue resolved, but that experience with 93 was very nearly enough to make me quit.
(I should probably mention, another long-running complaint I have with Firefox is the community's habit of gaslighting anybody who talks about Firefox's problems with the usual "I never experience that so your experiences are invalid" So please spare me this time.)
Yeah, I totally understand what you are saying. One should point out however that my parent comment is pretty much the same, i.e implying that 'it's become unstable and slow for everyone'. Not that I want to blame them, we all have a limited point of view and comments on the internet often sound harsh simply by negligence and not intentionally.
I had this issue in my Firefox Nightly for about a day. Next update or so resolved the issue for me. Obviously unstable bleeding edge isn't for everyone, but I does have it's benefits at times.
I switched to Brave this past year... so far so good. Firefox is fine, but I need a chromium browser for development, so chromium - google seems like a good alternative. I tried Vivaldi a couple of years ago but it didn't stick... will try again.
If Vivaldi doesn't have a store, then they won't have the choice to follow Google because developers won't be able to make their Manifest V2 extensions available for download.
Every time a vivaldi post shows up on HN it attracts a lot of negative comments (and some positive ones). Will just add my voice to the mix - Vivaldi is my primary browser and I love it. On my 5 year old laptop I experience no slowness, and I generally enjoy it's very user-focused features. I also enjoyed Opera prior to version 12. I recognize it's not the browser for everyone, but on my Linux boxes it's the second app I install (mutt is the first one). Your experience may vary.
There is a good interview with Vivaldi founder on Tedium [1] where he basically says that because most browsers are built on Chromium nowadays, you have to innovate on features and that is the direction they took. And really the number of features in Vivaldi is staggering including some great ones like Tab Stacking and Tab Tiling.
But adding this many features took a toll on performance and it is about 25% slower than other Chromium based browsers. Also I assume that is the reason why is there no Vivaldi on iOS.
[1] https://tedium.co/2021/02/05/vivaldi-browser-history-profile...