 So, I have a very complicated history with the Vivaldi browser, so at one point I called their developers hypocrites because they call their browser 95% open source and think that that's a good thing. And I also have talked about how that it's bloated as a whole bunch of nonsense thrown in like an email client and an RSS reader and all this stuff that you don't really need in a browser because those are better as separate apps. So I have some issues or have had some issues in the past with Vivaldi. And some of those issues are still around. So like the email client and the RSS reader are still there, but you can disable them right on your first boot so you don't have to ever see them, which is good. Things like them still claiming that they're 95% open source when that really doesn't make any sense because who cares if you're 95% open source, if you still have that 5% proprietary nonsense, you're still proprietary. So whatever it's like calling Google Chrome open source when it's not, it's not. It might be based on open source technology, but it's not open source. It's proprietary. So Vivaldi has the same issue. So them touting the fact that they're 95% open source has always rubbed me the wrong way. However, like I said, I have a long complicated history because I've basically turned 100% or 180 degrees around on Vivaldi. I now consider it the best browser out there for some people. I qualify my statement for some people because it's not for everybody. It's definitely not for everybody. So despite the fact that I am now a Vivaldi fan boy and have been for a little while and I'm going to talk about why, I can be fully honest with you and just tell you that for a lot of people, a more simple browser like Firefox is going to be better for you or even Chrome itself, if that's the way you want it to go. But for people who are like me, who use a ton of tabs specifically for a lot of tabs, there's no better browsers and we're going to talk today about why. So let's go ahead and jump in. But before we do, if you leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It really helped the channel. So let's go ahead and talk about why I think the Vivaldi is probably the best browser out there. So right here is my setup of the Vivaldi. And I'm going to talk about five reasons why I think it's so good. But let's just get the number one reason why out of the way right away. Because honestly, if this feature here went away, I could easily switch back to Firefox, all the other ones I could do without, despite the fact that I think that they're really good. But this one here, I can't do without and I've tried. So what is that feature? Well, that feature has to do with tab management. So right now, if I take a look at my workspaces, and this is what we're going to be talking about, I have 17, 24, 14, 11, 8, and 1, plus another one randomly floating around. I have a ton of tabs open. Now, I have had in the past many more tabs open. I've been trying to consolidate a little bit. At one point, my reading workspace had like 50 different tabs open. And my ideas had over 100. I've been slowly weeding things out. I've been trying to do better in terms of tab hoarding. But this is the way that I do tabs. And the reason why I consider it to be okay to do tabs the way that I do them is because Vivaldi does this thing. So workspaces are basically collections of tabs. Now, every other browser out there has this functionality in some form or fashion. They call it tab groups. So Chrome has it. All the Chrome derivatives have it. Firefox has a plugin for it called simple tabs groups, which is really, really good. I used it for years and it's fantastic. But it's not quite this good. And the reason why is because if I go to my ideas workspace, I actually have groups inside of a workspace. So it's basically a group inside of a group. And I'm maybe not the most organized person in the world. I'll never claim to be so, but I like to be organized when it comes to my tabs. I have all of my bookmarks categorized into different folders into a folder tree, specifically per subject, right? I'm one of those really annoying people who completely I have like 150 to 300 bookmarks, maybe even more. But they're all precisely cataloged in different folders, the way that they should be. That's the way that I am. And I like to do the same thing with tabs and Vivaldi allows me to do that. So I have the apps tab group inside of ideas. This is where all of the apps for upcoming videos that I want to make live. Same thing with distros that I want to look at. So I have all of inside of the distros tab or inside of the distros group. I have all of these tabs open and I can just store my tabs there. Now, if you're not a tab hoarder, this probably makes no sense to you. Like why would I need such a thing? I'm never going to keep that many tabs open in my entire life. A lot of people are exactly like that. And you know, that's the way you want to live your life. That's perfectly fine. Just as long as I can live my life this way as a tab hoarder. Don't judge me, right? So same thing with window managers and stuff like that. So I can be as organized as I want to be when it comes to the tabs that I leave open. And that's awesome. That just frees me to use the browser the way that I want to use it, which is to leave the tabs open. I don't have to have a list somewhere that I'm going to lose. So for example, I've done this in the past. Before I became a tab hoarder, I kept a pocket list. So I have pocket, which is owned by Mozilla. It's not open source, which is weird, but whatever. I used pocket for many, many years. I still use pocket now every once in a while when I need to save something that I'm going to eventually transfer to a tab in Vivaldi. I would save it in pocket. But the problem is that pocket is something that I don't have open every day. In fact, I hardly ever have it open. I only open it when I want to save something. I don't go there to read articles or any of that stuff. I just never have developed that habit. And because of that, a lot of times things that I would save there to have ideas for later would just kind of fade into memory. I would never see them. But by doing it with tabs, every time I come to the ideas tab to find an idea for a video, they're right there in my face. They're not going to go anywhere. I've had the left WM tab open for months and months and months. Eventually I get around to making this video. And I'm reminded of it every time I go to the ideas tab because it's there. It's in my face. I'm never going to forget it. So that's the reason why I have become a tab hoarder. Some people, like I said, are not like that. So Vivaldi, that's the number one feature. Workspaces and tab stack, which is what they call this tab stacking feature, is amazing. It's by far the number one reason why I would recommend using it, like Barnard. And like I said, and the reason why I said this is because not everyone uses tabs the way that I do. If you don't think you're ever going to use that feature, then the rest of these probably won't matter as much to you as they do to me because the rest of the features that I'm going to talk about today just kind of complement this. If I weren't a tab hoarder, I'd still probably using Firefox, to be honest with you. But this one feature is so damn good, I can't leave it behind. So another feature that I really like, and to show you this, I have to go to the settings. One of the things I really, really like is that I can change where everything is at. So if I want the tabs to be on the top, I can have them on the top. If I want to have them on the side and make it so that they're either like this so that I can do this, or if I can make them just the icon so that they look like that, those are my tabs. I can do that. I can put them on the right if I want. I can have them on the bottom. Let's go ahead and leave them on the left. It doesn't really matter. The same thing with the address bar, I can change that from top to bottom. I can turn it off completely if I wanted to want it at all, you know, whatever. I can basically do all the customization you'd expect to be able to do with Firefox CSS right in the settings panel of the vaulty. That's really nice. Now, it's not as fully functional, obviously, as full blown control with CSS like Firefox has, but it doesn't break. So if you've used Firefox CSS in the past, you'll know that when Firefox pushes a major update, a lot of times your CSS, your user Chrome, breaks. And you either have to wait for, you know, support, or you have to figure out CSS how to get to work again, or some things stop working because they take some certain features away, whatever. It breaks a lot. Whenever they do an update, a lot of times, it'll break. And this doesn't, which is nice. So I can have as much customization in terms of how it looks and feels as I want to have. So that's awesome. So the next one that I want to talk about is the extensions menu. So this is the extensions menu. And I made a video. I made the silliest video ever, probably a year ago, maybe six months ago. I don't even know when Firefox introduced their extension menu. So on Firefox, actually, I think I can show you this. I think I have Firefox actually installed. On Firefox, no, I don't interest it as a default browser. They have this extensions menu. And I don't actually have any extensions here to show you. But basically what it does is it brings an actual list, a drop-down list of extensions. And it also has a overflow menu, which you'd use for other things. And sometimes you'd have both of them. And it'd be a pain in the ass, and it looks really weird. And it's not customizable at all. You can't turn it off, whatever. Grasp me bonkers. Now, on Vivaldi, you also can't turn it off, which is fine. But they do have the option for several different ways of using it. So I can either have this expandable thing where it just shows up in the top bar and hides the ones that I don't have pinned. That's nice. That's the way that I use it. Or it can be a little bit of a drop-down thing where you press it and it will drop down all of the non-pinned ones down below. Kind of like Firefox, but just the icons. So I like the way that it does it way better. Like I said, it's really freaking minor. It's not a feature that is going to change anybody's life. But it's that one little thing that I enjoy the way it does it here more than I ever did on Firefox. Because that extension manager, like I said, I made a whole video about the extensions menu on Firefox. I ran it about it for like 15 minutes, which is impressive. It's very talented that I could ran about a little bit of menu for 15 minutes, but I did it. And it really bugged me at the time because I didn't want it. They already had the feature basically with the overflow menu. I didn't understand why they needed to have both. It was whatever. I did not suit the way that I like to have Firefox, especially at that point, because I was really into user Chrome, I was really getting into the CSS stuff. And them adding that in and making it basically impossible to remove really, really bugged me. So while I can't remove it on Vivaldi, I like the way that they've done it better. So that's the third one. The fourth one is one that I can't really show you. And that is synchronization between devices. Vivaldi does a really good job of syncing between devices. Now Firefox also does, and they both have the horribleness of having to have an account in order to have sync actually work. But I have found at least that Vivaldi feels a little bit more selective on what you can and cannot sync. In other words, it gives you more, it feels like it gives you a little bit more control over what's actually being synced now. It's not 100% accurate because I went through the Firefox sync and it actually gives you the same. But the feeling for me has been that this actually works better because sometimes, and this didn't happen all the times, but in Firefox, when I had certain things sync that I wanted to sync, those would sync. But if I turned things off that I didn't want to sync, those would still sync. And that bugged me. And specifically when you use a browser on multiple different platforms, so if you have an Android and an iPhone or whatever, or if you have an Android tablet and an iPhone, whatever, that really got messy really, really fast. And also turning off sync for Firefox requires you to go to a website to delete the device. That was not great. Here you can just delete the device right here in the settings panel, which is nice. It's great. So the syncing was the fourth one. Again, not a huge feature, not a ton better than the way Firefox does it. But it seemed to have been better for me in Vivaldi than it ever was in Firefox. And the fourth one, the final one is something that I did not think that I would use ever. Ever, ever. Because there's this pan. Honestly, when I first started using Vivaldi, it bugged the crap out of me. I always wanted to hide it. And that's the sidebar, right? The sidebar. Why is it here? What does it do? Why do I need to use it? Why can't I just turn it off? Those are my thoughts when I first started. But man, I'm glad it's here. Okay. Because it's good. And I use it all the time now. So I used to have mastodon pinned all the time. And it was just kind of open in a tab somewhere. Wherever my tabs are, I'm not going to get used to actually having those over there again. But I had it open all the time. And the longer mastodon is open, the more memory it takes. That's just kind of the way it is. So I have it in a web panel along the side. And I can come here. I can check out my notifications. I can go to the feed and do whatever I need to do. And then when I'm done, I can just close it. Okay. I do that a few times a day. I'm fine with it. I have mastodon on my phone. So if I want to do some doom scrolling, I can do so. I never do that on the computer anymore. I just have this over here. I can open it. And it goes, wait, eventually that closes on its own. It doesn't take up many, many. I've done the same thing with Google Drive. So I have a Google Drive over here. Now the one thing that I will say that I don't really care for with the web panels is that if the application has a mobile website, it automatically uses the mobile version. And a lot of times that treats it as an application, as like a mobile application. So like with the Google Drive thing, you can't really use that thing to upload. So really that's just a browsing mechanism for me. So that's kind of disappointing. But I don't have the problem with the mastodon because I don't have a mobile site really that's different. They're kind of just the same site, but responsive. You can use it like the regular mastodon thing. So I've been using that like crazy. Also, I enjoy having the downloads over here. I didn't think that I would, but I do enjoy having the downloads over here instead of having to go to a, you know, about colon downloads or whatever or find the downloads menu because it doesn't actually have a downloads menu. It just has a downloads panel, which is I find actually just a little bit better. Also when you're downloading stuff, it gives you the size of things and it gives you a graph of how it's doing in terms of bandwidth and stuff like that's nice. You can also get to your bookmarks and stuff over here, but I don't really ever get to the bookmarks there. So web panels is a thing that I didn't think I'd ever enjoy, but especially with the mastodon, this works really, really well for me and just thinks that you visit very often, but you don't want to have pinned in a tab. That's where I put it. So that's the web panel. So those are the five things that I really like about Vivaldi and the reason why it's perfect for me. But like I said at the beginning, and especially considering the fact that the best feature that I consider above Vivaldi is the tab groups and tab stacks and workspaces. If you don't think you'd use that particular feature, then Vivaldi may not be for you. It doesn't mean that it won't be because it's still a perfectly fine browser outside of that feature. But what makes it special, at least for me, is the fact that it has workspaces and tab stacks. That's what makes it special for me, and that's because I can use that feature. If you're not a tab hoarder like I am, then maybe it's not going to feel as special for you. So let's then talk about the elephant in the room. And we talked about it a little bit at the beginning because I've talked about my history with Vivaldi, but Vivaldi is not open source. Despite what they claim it being 95% open source, I don't care how much open source code you rely on. If you still have partially proprietary code, you're proprietary. That's just the way it is. And yes, I use proprietary software. I'm sorry. I do. I know I'm a FOS evangelist or whatever. I talk about FOS. I think that people should use Linux. I think people should use as much open source software as they possibly can. If they can, they should support it by using it by giving support to the developers monetarily or through volunteer work or whatever. I'm all for all that stuff, and I do it as much as possible. I try to practice what I preach when it comes to using FOS over proprietary software. Right now I'm using Audacity instead of something like from Adobe. Right now I'm using OBS instead of whatever. I'd still use OBS. Let's just be honest about that. OBS is really the only thing to use. If I can possibly, if there's an open source alternative to whatever it is and it's good, I'll use it. I prefer to use it because I want open source. But if there's a proprietary piece of software that has a feature that I like or the open source version is bad, I'll use proprietary software. I just will. I tend to try to use the best tool for the job, but I'll prefer FOS when I can. That's the way that I always look at it, but I know that in the comments below there are at least 10 people, maybe many more, who are furious right now because I use proprietary software that I'm using a proprietary browser when I could be supporting Mozilla and Firefox because it's a fine browser. It's a good browser. I use it for many years. As you saw, I still have it installed. I still use it from time to time when I need to. But there are people in my comment section right now who are furious. They're mad. They're leaving a comment and then they're going to unsubscribe. I will bet money that there will be at least five people who will unsubscribe for me, maybe even more because I use proprietary software and I had the audacity to make a video about it and calling it a good browser. How dare you, Matt? How dare you? I understand. I understand. I do. I'm sorry to say you go. My using a piece of proprietary software really bugs me that much so much that you can't subscribe to my channel anymore. I'm sorry to say you go, but it's just going to have to be the way it is because I really like the features of the Vivaldi offers. I really, really do. And especially with the tap stuff, I've had a hard time moving back to Firefox because there is a little itch in my brain that reminds me every time I open up a Vivaldi that is proprietary and that I could use Firefox instead to do 98% of what I enjoy with the Vivaldi. There's that itch and I've tried to go back to Firefox many times because the itch gets to me, that same itch that gets to a lot of you, like, oh, I want to use open source software all the time if I can, but then workspaces get to me. That one feature, I told you at the beginning, that one feature just really does me and it just keeps me there and probably will for a while. So that's it for this video. For those of you who are still subscribed and are still watching, thank you for watching. If you haven't already, leave a thumbs up on this video. I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel would kind of cancel all those furious people who are no doubt leaving thumbs down angry comments and death threats and unsubscribing from the channel. So if you could leave a thumbs up, I'd really appreciate it. You can follow me on Mastodon or honestly, if you want to bitch at me because I use proprietary software, follow me on Mastodon, we can have a conversation about it. All those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. I'm also on Kofi and there's a YouTube join button down there. If you want to help support me monetarily, you can also then over to the shop, which is at shop.theLinuxcast.org there, you'll find t-shirts and hats and desk mats and mugs and all sorts of stuff. It's all really awesome merch. 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