Web Browsers Update: Vivaldi on Windows Part 3 and Firefox

EricMesa

- 3 minutes read - 546 words

This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:

Vivaldi

I’ve been meaning to get to this post for a while now, but the recent Vivaldi update blog post spurred me to go ahead and write it. Vivaldi continues to do a decent job for me on Windows. As I’ve been planning on posting, I don’t do much web browsing on Windows. It’s mostly just uploading videos to YouTube and looking up various sites related to the games I’m playing. Pretty much any browser could fit in there. That said, in Vivaldi’s blog post they have a video demonstrating their new pause mode and before they pause things, they have the tabs tiled. I had completely forgotten that was a thing! It would have changed the way I did my FunkWhale vs Ampache video. That is, of course, a common issue with Vivaldi (and its predecessor, Opera). It has a million features and if you aren’t always making use of them, it’s easy to forget about them.

A grid of 3 Vivaldi tabs

Firefox

One of the big themes with Opera was always being the first (or one of the first) with various web features (like tabs), but having them made famous by others. Looks like the trend continues with Vivaldi (Opera’s successor - although Opera does live on as a Chinese company). I mentioned in the video from my Vivaldi Part 1 post that Vivaldi had the ability to send a video to another window like Picture-in-Picture in the original “Big Screen TVs” (back when I was a kid and what is a normal size TV now was HUUUUUGE). Then in July I got an email from Firefox that led to this blog post. Firefox had added Picture-in-Picture. I wonder if Vivaldi will continue to be the browser that comes up with all the features, but gets none of the love (in terms of user percentage).

That said, Firefox recently had to lay off a bunch of folks, leaving the future of Firefox, the Rust Programming language, and many other initiatives in limbo. I went to use Firefox Send the other day and found it disabled.

Where do we go from here?

While I continue to really enjoy Vivaldi, I’m not really taking too much of an advantage of its features on Windows. I think I’m going to move on to Brave on Windows to see how that fares. After that will be the new Cromium-powered Edge. I’m not in a rush and things are picking up at work as we move to normalize things as COVID-19 cases continue to fall in the state. But that should be the next update. As I mentioned last time, Vivaldi was more performant on my Laptop, but the twins have mostly been using my laptop to play Stardew Valley with each other (laptops and our HTPC) and so I haven’t had as much time on the laptop. My main desktop is my powerhouse, so I haven’t yet made any real changes there. I do have all the browsers installed on here, I just haven’t taken the time to mess around with them yet. I may save that for after I settle on my Windows default browser.