@Pesala
As a senior developer/configurations manager my self I'm well aware of that, however by just looking at Chrome or Edge as an example, what I and many others look at as bugs are in their eyes "features". Thankfully comparing Chrome or Edge with Vivaldi in terms of configurability of such "features" makes it obvious why many around me are looking for alternatives for what once was considered "the browser". Chrome have sadly become the next Internet Explorer, they are so big they think no matter what they do they can't fail. Also not to forget, this forum exists and the developers and community actually work for a better experience rather than the alternative, something Chrome and Edge users can only dream about.
I've tried gestures in various OS and software in the past but never liked the concept, it just feels clunky and cumbersome, for me personally it's just smoother and easier to press the two buttons located right under my thumb. That (among other things) is why I could never get comfortable using iOS in the past when my work provided me with an iPhone, rather than just pressing the convenient "Back" button that was always located in the same place I either had to play the "guess where the app developer placed the back button" game or use cumbersome gestures, for me that just felt like I was using a toy rather than an actual work tool. However to Vivaldi's credit, the implementation of them are among the best I've seen, they actually work!
@Pathduck
I tried a clean profile and everything worked, I restored my profile and the issue came back (as expected). I did however notice that it wasn't the case that I needed to open the "Start Page" as I thought before, I just needed to open more than one tab and visit that tab regardless of content for it to work. I played around some with the settings, the blocking etc but nothing seemed to work, then I decided to clean my history and when I opened up the browser again I noticed that the popup about if I want to accept or reject cookies on Google was in one of my Web Panels rather than on the actual page.
That got me thinking, could they be the cause, so I removed the most obvious one first, Google Maps, that fixed the popup sometimes showing in that web panel rather than on the main Google page however my issue remained.
I then removed my second and last web panel which was my local towns weather from YR dot no and that solved it.
At the moment I'm not sure if I want to run without my web panels or if I want to open and visit two tabs as a workaround but regardless of what I decide in the end I was able to get the same behavior on a fresh profile so it may be an issue there worth looking into.
Regards
SuedKAT