Better extension support in Vivaldi
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I've been using Vivaldi for half a year now, and there is one major issue, that bothers me from the beginning. The terrible extension support this browser has.
Vivaldi is a very powerful browser, but still, it cannot and should not cover all the needs out of the box. Additionally, the pace of development is very slow. Which is totally acceptable, but with a better extension support, they could make it easier for us to wait months or years for a desired feature.
I am creating this topic to discuss issues and requests with the extension handling of the browser in general. This topic is not meant to be a single feature request, but a place to gather all the problems with the current state of the browser regarding extensions.
Here are the issues I've collected
- We need a proper extension manager. The current one is bound to the changes of Chromium, and we all saw its downside when v2.0 was released.
- It should include filters for packed and unpacked extensions,
- Sorting by date, name, etc.,
- The ability to remove, enable/disable and show/hide individual extension.
- Supporting the context menu of the toolbar buttons (
browserAction
andpageAction
) is a must. Good extensions lose important functionality in Vivaldi, because the browser ignores the context menu items of these buttons, and only shows the default ones. (This is a major issue!) - The extension toggle on the toolbar must be a way to hide extensions, but still make them available with a single click. (I think this issue is being addressed in the latest snapshot.)
- I am not sure whether yet another extension catalog would be the best idea, but somehow Vivaldi should break the dependency of the Chrome catalog. Many people don' trust Google, and personally, I won't pay a single penny for Google to host my freeware stuff.
- Vivaldi should support the
sidebarAction
API. I know we can add any extension page as a web panel, but an official support should include every feature from thebrowserAction
API, including the context menus. (See: bullet #2)
I hope, I am not the only one who has these problems. My goal would be to incite the developers to address these issues as soon as possible, because a strong foundation of extensions could ease the time we have to wait for other features we need.
- We need a proper extension manager. The current one is bound to the changes of Chromium, and we all saw its downside when v2.0 was released.
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It is true that not all trust much in the Google catalog, but in this catalog or by far all extensions are the responsibility of Google.
Many extensions are also in GitHub, if they are OSS, from where you can also install in Vivaldi, just drag the app to the extensions page to install it. -
@catweazle
I know how to install extensions. The problem with sources like GitHub and such is the lack of the auto update feature. -
The
browserAction
context menu seems to be working in v3.1. -