[SOLVED] Vivaldi on Kindle back button behavior

[jbrianc]

(I originally posted this on Mastodon, but thought it needs to be archived here as well)

TL;DR
Enable 'Back Gesture Refractor' in vivaldi://flags/ to fix.

The problem
After installing and using the Vivaldi browser on my Kindle Fire tablet, I discovered an oddity - the system back button (not the history back/forward icons in the browser toolbar) would not go back to the previous page as expected.

(image url )
Screenshot of Vivaldi flags settings showing the Back Gesture Refractor enabled.

Environment
Vivaldi 7.0.3505.165
Kindle Fire HD10 FireOS 7.3.3.1
(About Vivaldi reports: Android 9)

Troubleshooting
I confirmed the behavior is as expected on other mobile devices (an LG phone and Samsung tablet) with recent versions of Android.

Searches of the Vivaldi forum and web did not yield any similar reported issues. (I'll admit sideloading apps on Kindle is an edge case).

Digging into the issue, I noticed using the Kindle back button seemed to be moving thru the bookmarks side panel. For example: using the panel to select a deep nested bookmark, pressing back would go up the panel dialog. This isn't immediately obvious because the dialog closes after clicking a bookmark.

The Fix
I didn't find anything in the settings but exploring the flags features, I found-

vivaldi://flags/#back-gesture-refactor-android
and
vivaldi://flags/#back-gesture-activity-tab-provider

A little experimentation with these two settings led to the solution.

Hope this helps anyone else Brave¹ enough to install Vivaldi on their Fire tablet!

¹ see what I did there?

[jbrianc]

These flags appear to be missing in 7.2.3628.68 (Stable channel) (64-bit) . But behavior is as expected.