What made you decide to switch to Vivaldi?

edwardp

As per suggestion of @iqaluit, with a nod to @mathieulefrancois:

What made you decide to switch to Vivaldi?

mib2berlin

Hi, as I read Jon von Tetzchner and a part of the old Opera team start to create a new browser I was all in.
This was enough for me to switch.

Cheers, mib

edwardp

As for me, there was an article in the local newspaper back in 2015 that Jon acquired a bed-and-breakfast locally, which has now become Vivaldi's U.S. offices. I have been there a few times already. I remembered his name from Opera and once Vivaldi 1.0 came out (I was using Windows and Linux back then, I'm now using Linux exclusively today.), I downloaded and installed it. Never looked back.

Pesala

I switched to Vivaldi on January 27th 2015, but I continued to use Opera 12.18 as my default because of its email client until Vivaldi launched its built-in email. Soon after that, it became my default browser.

I still launch Opera 12.18 once in a while to backup important emails.

WildEnte

@mib2berlin I'm also an Opera Presto refugee. When Opera closed the my.opera community, Jon and team brought the Vivaldi community site to life, and I moved my old blog here (not blogging anything much anymore these days though). I could probably cope with other browsers if I really had to, but I need Mail to be integrated in the browser, so ... obvious choice. Plus, this is a company with a strong ethical backbone.

Catweazle

It was by chance, in June 2016 in a new PC, testing several different browsers I stumbled upon Vivaldi that seemed to me quite superior to others, since then it has been my main Browser.

Nene9603

Pues la verdad vi un YouTuber que recomendaba mucho este navegador y decidí probarlo por el años 2020 aproximadamente lo que más me sorprendió fue la increíble comunidad que tiene y la atención al público que es bastante rápida siempre tienen en cuenta todas las solicitudes que se le hacen, el navegador es buenísimo y tiene todo lo necesario te hace la vida más fácil. Lo mejor es la personalización no existen dos navegadores iguales.

Pesala

@Nene9603 The built-in translator is also very handy.

Well, the truth is I saw a YouTuber who highly recommended this browser and I decided to try it around 2020. What surprised me most was the incredible community it has and the attention to the public, which is quite fast, always taking into account all the requests made to it, the browser is great and has everything you need, it makes your life easier. The best thing is customization, no two browsers are the same.

CooperDad

Because it's cool and utterly flexible just like Opera Presto was!

iqaluit

First things first, I switched to Vivaldi because, it was the younger kid in the block standing tall against jaded bullies and decided to give a hand at least by installing and and humbly donating time to time and talking about it here and there if anyone listens at all.

Ethical approach is the most important aspect followed by georgeous interface and functionality that offers many possibilites that make it fun to play with.

Like too many things in the world, Vivaldi is not perfect either but I have concluded that the people behind this product have always been trying to push the limitations beyond and make it better and their dedication has an emotional component to this effort. They are loyal!

So everything I mentionned above and below is its background:

First time when I saw the name I was on a website which was not even in a language that I could read back then. So it was by accident. I (unfortunately) google-translated the page and realized that Vivaldi was also the name of a new browser and the comments were very positive.

I used it for a while at work for personal browsing until I was told to remove the program by the boss and IT and that was also the time when I got my first profile name and webmail adress. I did not even know that the forum existed so I never passed by here during that time.

I have used Vivaldi on and off multiple times and developped love and hate relationship which resulted in multiple negative forum experiences. However I grew older and matured more at online communication skills and finally realised that my distrust was baseless and that I was making my life more difficult by not using it based on my needs. So I settled in along with LibreWolf which another browser that I really like.

I have a suggestion:
Each time someone comes to forum, the mods that are in welcome comitee lists a bunch of very useful links to the newcomer. I suggest to add this topic link and a couple more (perhaps something about the preferred Vivaldi themes, usernames etc ) to make it a bit more fun. Thanks for considering and reading if you have made it this far. Cheers.

oudstand

I like the huge customization of Vivaldi. Especially if you want something but it's not supported by default you can easily achieve it with some CSS and/or JS.

Pesala

@iqaluit I added Themes and Groups to my list of links. It is just a note that I can insert very easily. Notes are also a good reason to use Vivaldi, whether it is for boiler-plate text, or keeping track of Feature Requests.

Welcome to the Community. Here are a few links for your bookmarks that you may find useful:

jane.n

Great idea @iqaluit and thanks for starting this topic @edwardp!

I love reading all of your stories!
Thanks for sharing.

DoctorG

@edwardp said in What made you decide to switch to Vivaldi?:

What made you decide to switch to Vivaldi?

Opera Presto was dead, new Opera Browser got worse in UI, and i did not trust the Opera investors.

mathieulefrancois

I used to use Opera back in the day. I lost faith in their direction, switched to Google Chrome for a while, then one day I was reading an article on The Verge and they mentioned that Jon was launching a new browser, so decided to try it. When it was in betas, I wasn't using it as my default full time browser, but kept an eye on it.

As soon as it started doing everything I needed, I switched to it full time and have never looked back.

Hadden89

Both Firefox and Chrome were too much into "we know what is better for our users" for my tastes.

paul1149

Customization and support. At the time I still considered Slimjet to be the best browser, but I saw that soon Vivaldi would eclipse it.

essebes

Back in my day as a CS major I used to be quite interested in InfoSec stuff, had a whole slightly activistic attitude about it. Somewhere over the years I lost that, and Google single sign-on stuff became super convenient. With the current state of the world I decided it's better for my personal peace of mind to move away from Chrome and back to more privacy conscious and GDPR aware browsers. Read a Reddit post about alternatives and here we are.

Zannennemi

Out of all the chromium based browsers, it is the only one with enough usability and customization options out of the box without the need to add 3 dozen plugins to copy a fraction of its power.

wintercoast

In brief, usability and features. I'm using only a fraction of its power, but I like the options to be available for when I may need them.

My history of default (desktop) browsers is:

Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi.

Along the way I've picked up some usage styles such that in going from one to the next, certain of the have become essential.

E.g., cycle in recently used order, vertical tab cycler, keyboard paste and go, mouse gestures, tab search.

There are probably other essentials that I can't think of right now. But a major reason for switching from Firefox to Opera and then to Vivaldi was when they switched from vertical to horizontal tab cycling. Definite usability regressions for me. I hope that Vivaldi never does the same!