Somewhere around the end of May, I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. It’s not been optimal but at least pages are loading now… I was getting endless Cloudflare verification loops and some sites were just not loading (even on a fresh bare nekkid install so don’t @ me, nerds). Then there’s all the *gestures wildly at everything* that Mozilla is currently doing. I figured I’d try something out.

It seemed my choices were box stock Chrome (h0rk), a downstream Firefox fork (I don’t want delayed updates), Brave (you all told me they hate queer folks and want to pave the rainforest), and then Vivaldi. Given that list I just held my nose and jumped into Vivaldi.

It’s quite pretty but it is not without its hangups. Here is my airing of grievances:

• Many of its features I am already using in other applications (email, vpn, rss, blah blah)
• It lacks my beloved container tabs (no other browser seems to implement this)
• Ad blocking is Fine (TM) but not as good as uBlock Origin
• All the tab tooling they provide is mostly useless and catches me when I try to re-arrange tabs. I do not wish to stack, group, shuffle, fluff, frobnisticate, or otherwise twiddle tabs.
• Features like split pages and such cause me the same issues due to my poor fine motor skills.
• Sync is a bit laggier than Mozilla
• It’s not fully open source (maybe?)
• It is the emacs of browsers; hella features.
• Profile launch menu fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Outside of all of that, it’s working well enough. I got around losing container tabs by making different profiles. This was a giant pain in the neck and I vibe coded a script to copy profiles for me.

That’s one of the major things that fell apart in Firefox for me as well. Due to the nature of my work, I have to be logged into 3-5 separate google and microsoft accounts simultaneously all day long. Neither the goog nor the microslop like this and they actively fight container tabs. So far, they do not fight profiles in vivaldi. I don’t know if this is chrome sorcery or what but for now, I’m safe.

In short: I don’t hate it and I can actually do my work again. I’m going to have to keep my ear to the ground to see what’s next in case this fails as well. Maybe I’ll have to look into Qubes OS (does that still exist?).