Vivaldi seems to have finally won me over
 

I have spoken here before about my love of Opera and how I used it from 2004-2017 before leaving it for Chromium. Now, I know they are not the same thing, but there are similarities in the staff base between Opera and Vivaldi, as far as I'm aware.

I always felt that Vivaldi as a browser was great but not 'quite there'. However, this latest version, 2.1.1337.51, seems to have tipped things over the line. The main thing is not only the functionality, which is great, but the appearance. Vivaldi gives the user so many options and so much control, but the new 'Window Background Image' option is a masterstroke - well done to whoever thought of that. The browser now looks beautiful.

I think this comes at a good time since I didn't like what had happened to Chromium after version 69: I was still using 68 and refusing to update. This now gives me a reason to move over and, to an extent, back.

So thank you ruario, and thanks to the Vivaldi team. You're doing a sterling job.

Thanks for your assessment, I'll have to give it another shot.

So far, so good. I have to enlarge the font next.

Set to minimum of 16. My older eyes can see this easier. Or, I need to buy a bigger monitor.... :)

I'm delighted with it. Panel on the left, tabs on the right. Maximum vertical screen estate, and the only layout that makes sense on a widescreen, 1920x1200 monitor. When will LibreOffice, Gnome, Firefox, Chrome and friends catch up? Accessibility shortcuts second to none, and many other features unique to the old Opera slowly making their way back.

vivaldi has become my main web browser now (version used: 2.1.1337.36_1).
However, there are still some issues such as quite often not being able
to play some videos (youtube, etc.).
In those cases I use ungoogled-chromium, which never fail.

Thanks Lysander666 and Gerard. I passed on your messages to the team!

Those videos almost certainly are MP4 files using H.264 and AAC. Try this page and see which videos play. Not being able to bundle support for H.264/AAC is not a technical issue, it is purely a patent/licensing issue.

That said, you can fix this for yourself:

https://help.vivaldi.com/article/htm...edia-on-linux/

P.S. The URL to this help page is printed on terminal if you start Vivaldi (stable) without proprietary media support, or in snapshot versions the command to fetch a suitable file is given directly.

The binaries you use are most likely built with proprietary media support built in, which may or may not be legally sound depending on where they are distributed from and/or if the person or organisation distributing them is covered by the relevant patent laws surrounding H.264 and AAC. If they are covered by these laws, you probably want confirmation that they paid for the correct (and in the case of AAC in particularly, very expensive) licenses. But IANAL and I am not really familiar with ungoogled-chromium, so you would need to do your own investigation to be sure.

On a different note I had a look at their download site. If you are using one of their hosted binaries, pay attention to this warning:

IMHO that is quite scary because you have no idea if they have been altered. In the case of using binaries from a company like Slackware, Vivaldi or even individuals like AlienBOB it works because over time these organisations and people have built up a level of trust in their respective communities but taking a binary that could have been built by "anyone" sounds very high risk to me. Make sure you know who the person is and furthermore make sure you feel confident that you trust them.

Tried it recently, liked it because it can load dependencies from /opt/vivaldi/lib/ (for example I can put libgtk-3.so.0 there without having to install it system-wide)
Interface is ok, probably better than chrome IMO. I'd use it full-time if only it could support userchrome.css and usercontent.css (which chromium can't do).

Well it is not really supported (for now) but plenty of users do customise the UI

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/1062...customisations

Yes I know about UI skins, but usercontent.css is something else. It's about painting websites, not UI. Skinning web content.
Sad story really, because chromium use to support it long time ago, and then chrome devs disabled it for "security" of users who were apparently "infected" by simple css file.
So yeah, if I want to paint a website according to my spec, I get "protected'" from my own css file now, and can't do it anymore in chromium engine.
Palemoon can load content stylesheets, I think new firefox can too but I haven't checked for a long time.

Perhaps, someone can ease my paranoia and explain how Vivaldi remembers what links I've visited on a page AFTER I've DELETED everything (the history, cookies, cleared the cache, etc.) but the save passwords ?

Looks like ruario attempted to answer this, but cwizard, you pointed out that his answer did not cover all your use cases.

Maybe someone [and/or ruario] could look into it and elaborate on this issue a little more.

I guess I wasn't clear when I wrote the post to which he replied, but when I clear cache, cookies, etc., I also always clear the history. Just part of the "whole" process. So, when I wrote that, clearing the history had already been done. I always clear everything, but the saved passwords. I pointed the out in my reply three posts later.
I notice in Vivaldi there is NOT an option for clearing "site preferences." Would that have something to do with it?
If it is remembering links the user has clicked on, it is storing browsing history somewhere and not deleting it when instructed to do so.

It would be good if the browser gave the option to have different styles/colours of icon for the panel [there is already this option for the menu bar: you have the 'burger', the red Vivaldi icon or a mono one]. However, you can only have a red one for the panel.

For now, if you want a different style/colour icon for the panel, you have to create one manually. The normal icon is in /opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/resources and is called icon_16.png, so you'd have to replace that and give your new icon the same name.

I simply cannot reproduce that at all, neither can my colleagues. You are selecting “For all time”, right? Also on what site(s) are you doing this? And have you compared with Chromium?

This is how I am clearing data (see attached image)