This post continues a series on exploring new browsers (last few posts):

• Vivaldi Part 4, Brave Part 2, Qutebrowser Part 1
• Examining Web Browsers: Microsoft Edge on Windows; Linux Browser Update
• Web Browsers: Linux Update; Firefox mistakes

Vivaldi

About 4 years ago I decided to start exploring various web browsers. Eventually I settled on Vivaldi as my main browser both on Windows and Linux. When I first installed Vivaldi, I mentioned that vertical tabs are very helpful on a wide screen monitor. I also really like the ability to tile my tabs and to name my tab stacks (because other browsers like Chrome have also added tab stacks) While at PyConUS I posted to Mastodon:

This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:

• Are Web Browsers getting exciting again?
• Vivaldi Part 1
• Vivaldi Part 2
• Vivaldi Part 3

I’ve been using Vivaldi on Windows for about four months now. As I keep saying, my browser needs on Windows aren’t too huge. Mostly I access youtube, the Stardew Valley Farm uploaded, and Google Docs. But I want to keep checking out new browsers on Windows first precisely since they are so important on my Linux computer. I don’t want to mess up a good thing there.

This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:

• Are Web Browsers getting exciting again?
• Vivaldi Part 1
• Vivaldi Part 2

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.

This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here.

Running Vivaldi for the first time.

For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better to save that one for last. But as I went through the first-run process in Vivaldi and saw the nice polish the browser seems to have, it really started tugging on me, saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to just stay with Vivaldi?” For this first post, I’d like to cover the first-run process and then a little video poking around the interface. This’ll be followed up in a while with any impressions I’ve come away from my usage of Vivaldi on Windows.

(just so you know, you should be able to click on most of the screenshots to see them more clearly)

Earlier this year, I took a look at flock. It didn’t impress me. In fact, I found it so useless to my browsing habits that I didn’t even bother to review it. I neglected to mention last time that Flock is built upon the same Gecko backend as Firefox. This is, as I have mentioned before, one of the best things about free and open source licenses. Firefox is a great technology, but it’s meant to be the every-man’s browser. This is expressed by Firefox’s own team and it’s why they have the plugin architecture. They feel that the Mozilla Suite became extremely bloated as it had a web browser, IRC client, email, and (I think) calendar built into it. It was a bit intimidating for first time users and took up quite a bit of RAM. Also, from a programmer’s perspective, it’s a lot harder to maintain something so complex. So, for Firefox they went for just developing a solid browser. Anything missing could be implemented via plugins.

I’m writing this from flock, a new web browser which comes with a lot of built-in utitlities for the most popular web technologies including flickr and blogging. I’m writing this post from within flock’s blog utility. I’m not sure yet if this is a worthy feature or just a gimmick. I intend to try flock out for a few days and see.

It’s just like the old days of Netscape vs Internet Explorer when more and more technologies kept emerging. After IE won the battle things were stagnant until Firefox came around with their tabbed browsing and so forth. We’ll see how this turns out!