I tend to use LibreWolf as my primary browser. I love Firefox, but I’ve been frustrated with Mozilla for quite some time now. LibreWolf works nice and smooth without the Mozilla mess.
Having said that, Vivaldi has turned into a fine browser. It’s grown and matured over the years. And its built-in adblocking seems to work VERY well. Obviously, Chrome/Chromium is a bigger mess than Mozilla. Vivaldi fits my needs really well. And the customization is excellent.
I recently switched from Firefox to Librewolf due to completely disagreeing with how Mozilla handles telemetry and just turning it on without your consent, among other securtiy issues and whatnot. Even its founders think it has become a complete joke (Mozilla, not Firefox). This is the first time I’ve ever switched from my one and only browser that I’ve used for more than a decade now.
The last time I tried Vivaldi it was on Windows. Haven’t kept up with it since. But I did like how much you could customize it. For adblocking, I still prefer my custom uBlock filter lists that blocks well over 2 million domains full of garbage.
It’s funny actually, Edge’s community manager got fired and then they complained about it on the Microsoft unofficial Discord, before proceeding to switch to Vivaldi and talking all sorts of smack about Edge. That’s the most recent memory I have of it, lol.
No way that Vivaldi’s anti-adblocking configuration can compete with Brave’s (not a fan though) or the Ublock origin addon. My greatest concern is the oncoming introduction of Manifest V.3 & how Chromium-based browsers will be affected.
Having Falkon as my main (& still gathering the scarce information on how to configure its built-in add-blocker to improve it) I want to see how it’ll behave AFTER MV.3 (since it’s using qtwebengine & not directly sharing Blink).
For my banking/shopping & visiting data hungry/suspicious-site needs, I used to have Firefox, just because I cannot work with any other browser that doesn’t offer its thematical account containers.
But NOT anymore. I’ve switched to Floorp & installed Zen, checking out its development (though still in alpha it’s quite impressive) …and… waiting for Ladybird (expected for an alpha release in 2026).
Well, I switched from Firefox to Zen. Mostly due to it’s different UI, potential customization and out of curiosity. It works, but isn’t polished. I’ll have to put some work into it to achieve a better user experience for myself.
My major impression is that they’ve included mostly CSS customization based upon legacy userChrome.css theme editing. But in a more elaborate package they’re trying to achieve. In parts, the features are already available as firefox extensions, to a certain degree at least.
My concern is : They introduced their small zen mods store, in addition to the given themes and extensions available. Some of the user-submitted zen mods are addressing the same very same issue. And a wrong combination of these mods may eventually break some stuff. They’ll need to put some effort into this, otherwise it would result in a mess rather quickly.
From these impressions … and by visiting their discord and other outlets. I don’t have the impression that they’ll contribute to the development of the gecko engine. But that might be a misconception from my side.
I have AdGuard (MV3 Beta) running here in Chromium and am also very satisfied so far. Well, YouTube is another story, but I have Premium for that (unfortunately there was no other way …).
Me, myself & I, are AAAAALL 63 years young. We should meet before joinining kindergarten, NEXT year. And bring along our favourite toys Santa will bring!!!
As long as Chromium stays in Manifest V 2, it sure does. AFTER that, with Manifest V3, Ublock Origin will come as Ublock Origin Lite, losing much of its capabilities as an add blocker. Unfortunately.
To my knowledge, ManifestV2 allows extensions to modify anything from a web page without restrictions. For Google, besides the incentive that there will be slightly less users without adblockers, the main consideration was this inherent security risk.
I don’t like this change either, but let’s understand something: Google can’t go directly towards adblockers, not even in this fashion. You know why? Their power and influence will lower. What’s more important: money or influence? Money can buy influence, but native influence gets you money in the long term, at least in my view. Google can surely find a way to completely get rid of adblockers if they really tried and wanted it, but they know they have to gain more by not worrying so much about what a bunch of power users do. Most people don’t run an adblocker.
Indeed, but at least the act of blocking ads is still available.
There’s an awful lot of articles about Goolag’s incentives & the changes MV.3 is designed to bring & I wouln’t want to spam (even more) on a topic about Vivaldi.
That’s similar to John Ford’s quote about his Model T car. “You can have it in any colour you like…as long as it 's…black”.
Simply, NOT for me & my needs, mate. As long as I can still get what I EXACTLY want elsewhere, that is. That’s what I’ve always hated monopolies for, their arrogance & power to set their rules AND impose them.
