 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel today. I'm gonna be talking about the Vivaldi browser now I've been using Vivaldi now off and on for two or three weeks and I have some thoughts and Most of them are confused thoughts and some of them are coherent thoughts and some of them are other kind of thoughts I I'm very Interested in this browser for a number of reasons I'm also at the beginning at least I was very interested in switching to the browser because of those reasons, so I just thought I'd make a video and talk about it because I have a very Interesting history with Firefox for the longest time. I've loved Firefox and Disagreed with all their politics stuff and now even the browser has kind of gone to shit and it's just It's not as good as it used to be and there's some changes that they've made recently They've made it made it harder to use they've made some changes that have made it harder to theme which is disappointing at least to me and You know, so I've been looking actively for months now to try to find a browser that I could switch to and I've tried Cute browser. I've tried Libre Wolf I've tried brave. I made a video about brave. I've tried Microsoft Edge, which was I don't understand why that exists at all And unless you're a Microsoft user, so I've tried like all the browsers sometimes all at once so it's been a long journey and Vivaldi was kind of my last stop and The reason why it was my last stop is because it's not open source I was trying to desperately to find a browser that is completely open source that I could support like Firefox and That's the reason why I put Vivaldi off until last because it's not like it's not open source it's based on open source technologies, but the Rapper that it's in is proprietary and Like I talked about in the podcast Tyler and I talked about in the podcast I don't think necessarily Proprietary software is bad and like I use tons of proprietary software every day It's just in this case in terms of the browser. I really wanted it to be false and I Think that I can say that my number one problem with Vivaldi and I'm gonna talk about a few of the other problems that I Encountered but my number one problem with Vivaldi is that it's not open source If it was completely open source, I could probably overlook the other problems that I had But because it's not I'm having a harder time So let's go ahead and just jump into what I think up past that Okay, so this is what my Vivaldi browser looks like and one of the reasons why I really wanted to try it was because Out of all the browsers that are out there Vivaldi seems to be the only browser manufacturer, I guess whatever browser developer that is willing to play around with the user interface now Firefox will go through and they'll make you know Changes to the user interface all the time, but those aren't user controllable Like they made that huge mega bar or whatever a few couple years ago and everybody hates it almost universally hates the mega bar You are URL bar or whatever But they didn't listen and it's still there and it still sucks so they make changes to the to the interface all the time but Though like I said, they're not user controllable and Chrome is look the same forever Brave just looks like Chrome Microsoft Edge just looks like Chrome with a few tweaks. I guess they have vertical tabs now, but you can do that in Chrome So I was really looking forward to Vivaldi because They seem to be at least a little okay with giving users a lot of options to control how the browser looks And I'm very much a person who likes to tweak how my browser looks I mean this this right here is what my Firefox looks like I have the one-line thing and I've done the whole user Chrome thing and you know I like being able to tweak my browser and that's why I Was looking forward to Vivaldi so much because I was able to Officially right in the the settings change how this looks I can actually show you can just go to settings here and Tabs and it gives you places where you can put the tabs they can Same thing with the address bar. You can put it at the bottom and stuff It's that's not something that any other browser does out of the box now You can do it with Firefox obviously, but you have to use CSS in order to do it That's really cool now. I wish it take it a little bit farther I would like to be able to get rid of this title bar completely That's just like a nitpicky thing. I'd I mean I just want to get rid of it I don't I use a window manager, so I don't need the the buttons up here, and I don't need a title bar I just want that all to go away. Supposedly there's a way to do it. I haven't been able to get to work But whatever it doesn't matter so I was really excited because I was really excited because it gives you that kind of control And it's really not something that you see anywhere else But once I started using the browser I started noticing some things first of all Vivaldi claims that it's faster than Chrome and It's faster than Firefox. I have not noticed this now Firefox is not the most speediest of browsers I Would go so far as to say Firefox is actually fairly slow when compared to Chrome but I you I put up with it because of Me not liking Chrome and also Firefox being better than Chrome in other ways For Vivaldi, I've not like I said, I've not noticed any speed You know benefits and in fact in some cases specifically with like Google products like YouTube and Google Docs and stuff. It's actually slower than Firefox as which is you know kind of saying something so The one thing you want out of a browser is to be able to use the things you need to use efficiently Or at least at the same level as the other browsers that it's competing with and Vivaldi doesn't offer that for me at least at least in my experience a lot of the things that it You have to use like especially Google products. Like I said seem to be Slower here than they are in Firefox and even way slower than they are in Chrome now, obviously Chrome does its own thing because Chrome and Google You know Google owns Chrome so that they can go through and optimize their products to you know suit that browser the best And that's the reason why the other browsers that aren't based on Chrome or aren't Chrome itself, you know tend to be slower But like I said, it's way slower in Vivaldi the other thing I noticed that I didn't care for is the syncing now Firefox has gone through and completely ruined their syncing in terms of like tabs thinking they moved their Synced tabs functionality from the library section to like a submenu of a submenu It's ridiculous and completely annoying. I sync tabs between my phone and my computer all the time It's something I do all the time now I've had to move to something like pocket in order to actually do this because Firefox has gone through and buried the functionality now Vivaldi does a little bit better in terms that they they don't actually go through and bury that functionality You can actually go through and I don't know if this is like I don't actually have any other tabs on my Phone to actually show you but at least in the phone It's very easy to go through and know what tabs are open on your desktop with a couple taps of your finger And that's okay But what I've noticed is that the syncing is not actually all that good Sometimes the tabs that you have on your desktop don't show up here in your phone for hours afterwards and by that time I've found some of the way to get the link and it's same going vice versa I've also noticed that sometimes it won't refresh so At least on the phone There's no way to like pull like I think I have an Android phone here, right and you go to the sync thing and it's great and My tabs that I have open here are open But if it doesn't sync automatically you can't just pull down to sync here I'm pretty sure you can go into the settings and like hit sync now But that's an extra step that I don't really want to take I just want to pull down to refresh now It took ages for Firefox to get that functionality to but that one little thing really bothers me because like I said I do that all the time. So that's another like mark against it another thing that I would say bothered me quite a lot is that there's no Real functionality for supporting plugins now it supports all of your Google Chrome part plugins But you actually have to search for the Google Chrome store in order to do it. I like it like a button I mean it doesn't seem to be a good way for a you know to get to your extensions like I mean you have the extensions manager, which is just the Chrome extensions manager Oh, you want to actually there's is a button up here. It says Chrome Web Store So and I didn't even notice that so that's kind of one like I visit the web store At least when I'm setting a browser fairly often because I have to get the you know the at least the regular plugins that I actually have to have Install and I didn't find that button till just now. So I actually had to Google The the web store, which is you know annoying and it's just a little thing But I mean these these are all just little things. It's the it's death by a thousand cuts The other thing I know I absolutely despise and I changed right away was that their default web browser default search excuse me the default search was Bing and I can't stand Bing I'm trying desperately so right now my my search browser my search engine is Duck duck go and I know somebody's in the comments and say well Matt duck duck go uses Bing I know and I constantly rail against Bing and duck duck go all the time because it's trash duck duck go is not that good. It's Good in theory. I want to support it. So that's why I try to use it, but 90% of the time I'm always going up here and saying oh my goodness I mean this is gonna be a bad example because Google doesn't actually do a good job of searching for the Linux cast Actually did this time We're ranking up in the search engines. It didn't used to show up like that, but 90% of the time I have to use the jing jing in duck duck go in order to Actually get the proper search results and that's because Bing is terrible And it's not necessarily because duck duck go is terrible But I'm pretty sure like said duck duck go uses Bing and It's terrible. It's not good. So I switched away from that automatically like I said, it's not something that's hard to change it's just the idea behind it like I don't know It's something that it's just yet another thing that added kind of on top of my experience of it. Not, you know Not being for me Uh, at least out of the box I've gone through and made all these customizations and I've changed the search engine I've you know changed the appearance and I've tried to work through the syncing issues that I've had the True thing that was bothered me is the slowness of it because it is Slower than firefox in certain areas now. It's also faster than firefox in some some areas too There's no true like even chrome is slower than something, you know Firefox in some areas There's no like true winner. That's across the board fast But the things that I use the most I mean, I I I know as a linux user I shouldn't be a big google user, but I use google software all the time. I use google docs every day. I use Uh google search every day. I use gmail every day. I mean, it's just it's something I have to do for work, right? So when I want to use a browser That browser has to be able to visit those things efficiently and Vivaldi just doesn't so I talked about several little things that were just you know that bugged me, right? But the two biggest things that bother me about Vivaldi is one that it's not open source and two it's slow and I might be able to deal with the slowness if it was open source I might be able to deal with the proprietaryness of it if it was fast so But the fact that it's both Means I can't switch to it. So that's a that's the the problem So I asked yesterday in the community tab on the channel if anybody else has been using Vivaldi and has been enjoying it and I think there was like one or two people said yeah, Vivaldi is not bad And everybody else is like well, you know, I use firefox or I use cute browser or something like that And firefox or Vivaldi slow, so I was not the only person who has seen Vivaldi be slow So it's not just me. I I thought maybe well, you know, maybe it's just my internet But that's kind of when I asked that question was because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't the only one Who thought that at least in some situations Vivaldi is Quite slow and like I said, that's comparing it to firefox, which already is Not the speediest of browsers. So My quest for a different browser continues now My next thing that I'm going to be trying is trying to get cute browser working with the The new ad blocking that it came out a couple months ago I have not been successful in that yet, but I haven't really read read into it all that much I'm hoping I can find like a tutorial or something on how to do it Because I do better with a tutorial than other than trying to just wing it So that's my next quest Because if I could get the vault or if I could get cute browser to work with ad blocking That will be my browser because when I reviewed cute browser two or three months ago My only complaint with it really was that it didn't block ads with the dam. So and Everybody always says well, Matt aren't sure youtube are trying to make money off from ads. I like yes, but ads are terrible I mean ads are Atrocious, especially those mill roll ads, which I'll never have I mentioned. I'm never I will never enable them So if you see them, that's youtube's fault. I just I can't I don't want people to cut my videos. I can have to show an advertisement. That's just dumb And rant So thank you for watching You can follow us on twitter at the linux cash You can follow us on facebook at the linux cash You can support us on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cash If you are a level two three four five subscribe Patron you'll get early access to some of our videos and actually I've been fairly Consistent in terms of getting early access to my subscribers for all the videos. It's this past week. So um, I don't know that it will always be all videos, but At least two or three a week is what I'm kind of aiming for you'll get early access sometimes 12 hours Sometimes a full day this one here will probably be closer to a full day now that I'm thinking about it because I'm recording fairly early So if you support us on patreon, you'll get or in and you are a level two through five patron You'll get early access to some videos. So if that's something you're interested in patreon.com slash linux cash And with that in mind, I'd like to thank our current patrons Devon marcus maiglin donnie mary camp and mitchell. Thanks everybody for your support. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time