 So for the last couple days, I've been using the Vivaldi web browser and I have some thoughts. So I've taken a look at this before, but I don't think I've ever done a proper video on it. And I've honestly have had some thoughts on Vivaldi, which I've shared in videos before, but I've never actually, you know, spent any good amount of time in the browser. So I thought it was about time I did so because Vivaldi is one of those browsers that have a lot of fans, like it has a very large collection of users who are very passionate about the Vivaldi. And I wanted to find out why. So I installed it, which was an interesting adventure. Seeing as how there's not a package for it on Fedora by default, you have to install their own repository, which is fine. It worked out OK, but it's not exactly the way I want to install software. I don't want to install some random repository off the internet, like a PPA. It gives me nightmares, but, you know, I did it and I installed it. So I've been using it now for a couple of days now and I have some thoughts. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Let's go ahead and jump in. So let's start off with the positive stuff first because I have some negative things as you might expect and we'll cover those. But in the guise of being a positive person, I'm going to talk about the positive things first. So the first thing that I really, really enjoy is the UI customization. So one of the things that I do on Firefox and you've seen me do this is that I customize the UI and Firefox allows you to customize it via CSS. And it basically opens it up so you can basically do anything with the UI that you want. Now, Vivaldi is not that permissive when it comes to actually customizing the UI. You are constrained to what they let you do, but they do let you do a lot more when it comes to UI customization than something like Chrome or Brave or whatever. So that's really nice. So I have set it up now so that I have the tabs along the bottom and I have the URL bar along the top. Now, there are several other combinations that you can do. So you can have the tabs along either of the sides if you want. So there are some options there when it comes to customization, which I really like. Another thing that I found that I highly enjoy is actually their quick actions panel. So if you press F2 on any page, you get this little pop up window and allows you to do many different things along with opening new windows, new tabs, customize a toolbar, go into full screen mode, see the task manager, get to the settings, extensions, history, notes, books, marks, the welcome tour for whatever reason that is in here. You can also delete browsing data from here, show the bookmarks bar from here. See the status bar from here. It just goes on and on. You can even change themes from here. So that is a really nice little piece of UI design that I've never seen before on another browser. It's just really nice. The problem here is that this is not discoverable. Someone on Mastodon told me about this, and that's how I knew about it. As far as I'm aware, unless you dive into the help documents, you don't know even know that this is going to exist unless you stumble upon it. So that's a little bit disappointing. But like I said, the fact that this exists, it's really nice. And I find myself using it quite often to change, open up new windows and open up the bookmarks bar, even though there is a key binding for the bookmarks bar, I've been doing it from here. It just feels, I don't know, a little bit different. It's kind of like opening in Rofia and opening up a application to Rofia. It's it was something different, at least. So I like that a lot. Another thing that I really found that I liked was the ability to tile web pages. So this is now you wouldn't think that because I use a tile, you know, window manager so I can open up, you know, none of the windows side by side if I want to. So tiling is not anything new to me or something that I can't do. But the volley allows you to tile web pages. So if you select web pages like so and then right click on them and then do tile two tabs, you get those web pages side by side and you can interact with them just by moving the mouse. There's key binding snoop back and forth. And it's really, really nice if you, especially if you have a big screen where having two things side by side makes a lot of sense. This allows you to have two things side by side without opening up a whole other browser, which is, like I said, very useful is if you're working in the browser a lot, having say Google Docs on one side and the website you're messing around with on the other side is is just highly useful. And as far as I know, this is the only browser that has that. This is going to be probably the premier feature that I'm going to miss when I switch away from the volley because I really like this. I even went and looked in Firefox to find if there's an extension that lets you do this. And there was one looked really shady, didn't download it. But but other than that, there doesn't seem to be a way to get this functionality in any other browser, which is a little disappointing. But again, this is just fantastic. Now, one of the things that I haven't been able to figure out is if there's a way to tile so they're not just side by side. If I wanted to do a, say, a horizontal split instead of a vertical split, there doesn't seem to be a way to do that, at least that I've found so far. So that's one area where this could improve. But the fact that you can tile them side by side is still just very a very nice feature. So another thing that I really like about this is that there are a lot of settings. Now, so everybody who watches this channel knows that I love to customize basically everything. So the fact that there are a lot of customizations when it comes to look and feel and how the browser works is something that I'm really interested in going through and I have over the last couple of days. So in terms of appearance, there is a lot of stuff here that you can change. You can even change it so that the settings app itself has different, you know, behavior and stuff like that, which is nice. You can also choose different scroll bars and there's some accessibility stuff here. You can change the menu position and the menu icon style. You can change the default zoom. A lot of the stuff is in other browsers as well. But when you add up all the stuff that allows you to do in terms of themes and how the tabs behave and where they're located and where the panel, the status panels are, where the address bar is, I mean, you can do basically anything with this browser and put stuff wherever you want. And it's just it's fantastic, especially for a browser that doesn't really allow you to customize stuff in a traditional way like Firefox does. So Firefox has the more traditional config file that you can configure stuff in, at least when it comes to like the UI, right? If you want to customize the UI with Firefox outside of a theme, you would have to use CSS. Now, Firefox does have plenty of settings itself, but it doesn't go to the extent that Vivaldi does. Now, just like with KDE, you can take the number of settings you have and go a little bit too far, but I don't feel that Vivaldi has done that. They seem to have done a fairly good job of maintaining a balance between settings and actual functionality, at least when it comes to the browser. We'll talk about the other stuff that they have here in a minute. The greatest thing, OK, hold on a second. Earlier, I said that the F2 functionality wasn't discoverable. It's right here in the setting that I completely missed it. I don't know. I don't know what I thought Quick Commands was. Does it say Quick Commands even when you do this? No, see, it just says commands. So I was looking for commands. I didn't I didn't make the correlation. Now, I'm an idiot. But anyways, so I take that back. The Quick Commands is, in fact, discoverable because it's right in the settings. But if you don't go spelunking into the settings, you probably wouldn't see that. So maybe my point still does stand a little bit. But anyways, the point is, is there's a lot of settings here and they haven't done a horrible job of making them discoverable. There is a search bar up there if you want to do search for settings, but you'd have to know what to search for. So settings is very good. So those are the positive things that I have for you. There are a few other minor things that are fine. Like it does a good job of actually browsing the web. I didn't notice that it was overly slow. It works fine with Google Docs, at least as fine as Firefox does. And it just it's a very proficient web browser and I enjoyed it. So those are the positive things, like I said, and let's talk now a little bit about the negative things that I've experienced and some of the things that are still kind of holding me back from actually collecting this browser. The first one, let's get the elephant out of the room just a little bit. Vivaldi is not open source and you can listen to their developers and they'll tell you that Vivaldi is based 95% on open source technologies. And that may be true, but it's the other 5% the stuff that sits on top of the open source code that bugs me and bugs most open source enthusiasts. OK, if 5% of your code is proprietary, then the entire thing is proprietary, especially when it's the thing that you interact with. Like the UI here is completely proprietary and that's what you interact with. You don't interact with the other stuff. All that stuff is lower end non-user space stuff. So the fact that you have a proprietary browser basically is a big deal for me. I prefer open source stuff and that's the reason why I use Firefox despite the fact that I have many problems with Firefox. So that's the big one, right? That's the big thing that I was not happy about. But outside of that, there are still a couple of things that I just really don't care for. So first and this one's also pretty big is that Vivaldi, they seem to be very interested in making this your one stop shop for everything. So if you notice when we went into the settings, there is down here for mail, calendar and feeds. My web browser doesn't need mail calendar feeds. Now feeds make sense to me. I could deal with that because that's stuff that's a feed from web pages makes sense to be in a browser. I could deal with that. But mail and calendar, well, both things that you can do in a browser, I prefer to have separated out into other applications. Now, maybe I'm just the weird one here. Maybe everyone else likes their browser to be the one stop shop for everything that they do. But to me, that just feels like it's putting your eggs all in one basket. I prefer to have my mail separated from my web browser. That's why I don't use web mail. I use a native client. I don't use Google Calendar. I use a standalone calendar that uses, you know, Caldav or whatever it's called and you know, just I don't want those things in my browser. And the thing is, is that when you're talking about all of the stuff that they're cramming in here, it starts to feel less like a web browser, more like an office suite. And that's a big problem for me because I don't want to use an office. I mean, can you imagine if Microsoft Word was also your web browser? Yeah, that doesn't sound like a very good experience. Now, I'll be 100% honest with you. I haven't used the mail calendar or feeds aspect of Vivaldi. I have no interest in doing so. So I just didn't do it. And I still won't be doing that. Even if I were to have Vivaldi stay on my computer, I am not going to use those things. I just those things don't go on a web browser for me. Now, like I said, I may be weird with this. Some other people may enjoy this. I in fact, I know people who enjoy Vivaldi like to have all their stuff here in one place. I do not. So that bugs me. Another thing in this one's more minor is that there doesn't seem to be a way to turn off the buttons up here for when you're in a window manager. Like we don't need these buttons. These are for when you're in a floating window manager. I wish those things could go away along with the title. Now it's possible that there is a place in the setting somewhere and I just haven't spotted it or it's named in a odd way. Like you can control the position of the controls, but there's no option there for turning them off completely. I just want them to be gone. But again, that's more minor because not everybody uses a timeline window manager. So having those off is probably a little weird for most people. Now, I should go actually go back to one of the positive things is that Vivaldi does have built-in ad blocking and it's probably the best built-in ad blocking that I've seen yet. Now, usually the built-in ad blockers are kind of subpar, especially when it comes to video ads. Now, that's where Vivaldi actually works really well. Because if you're on YouTube and you view YouTube videos, usually things like Brave or even the ad blocking and something like cute browsers, they just don't work on ad and video ads. They just they just don't. Vivaldi does and that's actually real good. Now, I don't think that this is actually Ublock Origin. Someone told me that this was Ublock Origin that was built in. I don't think that that's actually true. I think it's just a ad blocking or host list or something like that that they've blocked that works actually really well. So they've done a good job for not being Ublock Origin. So kudos to them for that. Now, one feature that is missing or at least that I haven't found is tab groups. Now, Chrome itself does offer tab groups. I know Brave does as well because they're basically the same browser, but I have not found tab groups in Vivaldi. Now, I don't know if that's just because I've missed it, which is possible. Or if it's just not here. Now, they do have something called stacking tabs, which is really weird. So if you select multiple tag tabs, you can use stack tabs. I'm not sure why this is useful, to be honest with you. If anything, it just feels like it's wasting space a little bit. So I'm not sure what that feature actually is, but I did not see tab groups here anywhere. And that is one feature that I'd absolutely have to have. Now, there are tab group extensions for Chrome, which would then work in Vivaldi. So that's not that big of a deal. But still, it's something that was kind of shocked that is not here, given the fact that they seem to have every other feature. And again, I may just be missing it. It's possible. Now, there are a couple of other things that I haven't really used that I see are here. So there's one thing here called periodic reload, which seems to be useful if you're constantly refreshing a page for like a package or something like that, you could have it reload for you at a frequent interval. So you can choose one, two, five, 10 or 30 minutes. That's kind of cool. That's not something that I've ever seen before. Another thing that they have is the ability to hibernate background tabs. Now, I don't know if this is something that you can do automatically. It seems more like something that should be done automatically, but you can if you want to have, if you have a whole bunch of tabs and you know you're only ever going to use one for a little while, you could hibernate the rest so they don't use a lot of resources. So that is a also a very good feature that they have built in. So that is Vivaldi and I have some final thoughts here. So I've had a very negative outlook on Vivaldi. The biggest reason is because it's not open source. So I judge it based on that. And it's not just Vivaldi that I judge. I judge Chrome just as much because it's not open source. I judge opera or whatever because it's not open source. So I'm very judgy. I'm very judgmental person and I can't help it. So I think the biggest reasons why I talk about Vivaldi so much about it not being open source is because they claim so hard that it's close to open source. And I don't know what everybody else feels about this, but if you're close to open source, you're not actually open source. So that's just not the way it feels to me. Like either you are open source or you're not open source using it all open source doesn't make sense to me. Now there's obvious 100% obvious arguments against my outlook on this because Linux itself then would not qualify as open source because it has proprietary blobs in the kernel. So I understand that my argument here is flawed. It's just when it comes to Vivaldi, I think that their rhetoric on it just kind of rubs me the wrong way because I don't know. It feels like they're so proud of themselves being based 95% off open source. And also I don't really understand why the rest of it can't be open sourced. And then it would just remove that argument against Vivaldi. But I'm sure that they have their own reasons. So just beyond that, that's the reason why I've had this kind of mental negative block towards Vivaldi for many years. But honestly, I could get past that because I use proprietary stuff all the time. I use an Android phone, which is based majority on proprietary software. I use a whole bunch of Google applications. So I am not one to talk when it comes to anti proprietary stuff. I will use proprietary stuff if it's good. So the fact that Vivaldi is proprietary is not my only reason. My biggest reason is the one that I talked about before. And that is that it feels like an office suite to me. Like it has too many things in there that I don't really care for my browser tab. Now you don't have to use them obviously. And it's not pushy. That's one thing that I will give them credit for is that after the initial setup where it tells you that it has these features, it doesn't come keep popping up. Hey, use our mail browser or mail client. Hey, use our feed thing. It doesn't do that. I haven't seen one mention of them outside of the settings since I started using it, which is again, a credit to them for not being pushy about it. So if I wanted to use Vivaldi, I could use it and just ignore those things. But there's this just it would live in the back of my head, right? It would say, why is this stuff here? Why is this stuff here? It's just that it would not me just constantly. And it would ruin my experience overall, I think. So that is the reason why I don't use Vivaldi. It's because it feels like it has a whole bunch of stuff in there that I just don't need. Anyways, that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on Vivaldi, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. I'm sure there are some people out there that really, really like it. Vivaldi that are upset that I don't also like Vivaldi. I'm going to end this video on saying use what you like to use. I prefer Firefox. I didn't have a horrible time with Vivaldi. I just don't like all those extra stuff. Plus, I'm also very invested in being able to edit my UI via CSS. I'm not sure if that's something you can actually do with Vivaldi. I don't think it is. So I'm kind of invested in Firefox as it is right now. So plus also tab groups, man. Tab groups are the thing that I definitely need. So there are reasons beyond just the fact that it's not open source. So anyways, comments in the comment section below. If you like or just like Vivaldi, I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mass Sound or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast. Links for YouTube and the bear pay will be in the video description. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing without you. The challenges will not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are all amazing. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.