Tested Vivaldi again (v 4.1)

General system Applications
1

…And I have to say… the Chromium engine is still superior to Firefox’s. Pages load faster, everything feel smoother. Seriously, Firefox even with activating the webrender engine in about:config in the latest version feels… janky and slow compared to Chromium-based browsers in general.

Other than that:

  1. As before Vivaldi feels like a waste since 99.97% (roughly) of it’s features are irrelevant to me
  2. The settings have reasonable defaults (including privacy) but the browser as a whole suffers from Plasma syndrome: Too many settings everywhere.
  3. Was I to switch to a Chromium-based browser I guess Vivaldi is the only option since Chromium no longer has a working sync function, which is mandatory for me. I find browsers without sync unusable.
  4. Other than point 3 above for me, personally, Vivaldi holds absolutely zero benefit over Chromium.
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2

Can you pls explain what you mean by that?

3

I never had a feeling that pages load slow in ff, I guess I have to try other browsers, but could be because may internet is so slow that it doesnt matter which browser I use, it is faster on my iphone on cellular network :laughing:

4

Sounds like you should urgently update from v. 49.0 to the current v. 92.0 :wink:

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5

Ha.

It cleary states that I run 92.0.
I stand by my statement tho; Chromium based browsers just feel… smoother. Faster.

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6

Me either. :man_shrugging:

That is not a syndrome, but a blessing. :raised_hands:

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7

Oh no, look at me, a poor Plasma user, I can change the colour of my menus. I wish I was a GNOME user and had to install an extension that breaks every 6 months… Woe is me!

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I am a gnome (and kde) user and dont need extensions then everything is fine :blush: I just login into my qtile or i3wm and change my config file.

Too much bloat :laughing:

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Actually Vivaldi tweaked Chromium a few versions back, so we can’t compare chromium per se from Vivaldi tests.

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Then it’s even more of a shame that Chromium doesn’t have sync while Vivaldi is messy UI-wise… :frowning:

The only reason I went back to FF was that Google removed the sync from Chromium.

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I feel like Vivaldi is going in a direction “nobody” asked for. Built in mail client and calendar? Wasn’t that Seamonkey? It feels like someone at Vivaldi long for the old days.

On top of this the whole interface is so very bloated.
I wish I could get rid of the sidebar completely; I also really miss a good Bookmark Button. At the moment only Firefox has an actual classic bookmark menu.

If there was a Vivaldi / Brave mashup without all the crypto and “Oops we did a ‘mistake’ redirecting” from Brave and all the bloat from Vivaldi… Just a mostly empty browser window with privacy, good sync, and good speed… I would leave FF quickly.

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12

F4

Most of the bloat can just be disabled or tweaked to the minimum visual overload. The mail client and calendar has a toggle. you can find inspiration from this

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13

I haven’t really done any research on this one, like not at all. You might want to look into it yourself?
(Maybe you already have done.)

https://www.srware.net/iron/

YT

https://youtu.be/pt7tDInzeGQ

14

I haven’t used SRWare Iron recently but I stopped using it in the past because it got security updates way too slowly from upstream. It was sometimes substantially behind.

That being said, I haven’t tried it recently so that may have been cleaned up.

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15

I used that 1000 years ago (it feels like). Didn’t even know they were still around.

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16

Apart from the slow updates, what did you think of it privacy-wise?

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Unfortunately, I don’t remember, it was quite a while ago.

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