Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

After reading a few reviews I decided to try Vivaldi out. After importing my bookmarks and customizing my bookmark bar (just a little drag and drop) I was ready to go. Without trying any formal timing tests, my purely subjective impression is that things load faster. I don't have the tools or the patience to do formal testing so I'll wait for something official to be done later.

Like Brave, it is based on the Chrome engine, and as such supports extensions that can be found at the Chrome Store. My personal preferences are AdGuard AdBlocker, Google Dictionary, and HTML5 AutoPlay Disable. Settings are displayed much more conveniently than in Chrome, Brave, or Firefox. My only complaint was the way it handles pinch-zoom. On Brave, pinch-zoom works like most photo display apps. The whole display is zoomed with edges moving off the page, available by panning. On Vivaldi everything is made bigger and reformatted to fit on the page. Upon checking the Vivaldi forum I discovered that by going to

  • Settings
  • WebPages
  • Default Web Page Zoom

and unselecting Use CTRL-Scroll to zoom page, pinch-zoom now worked like I wanted. My initial impression is very favourable.

It's available for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.

Edited by Reverend Jim
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dnBunnie commented: I'm using maxthon for over 20 years now, along with other browsers. Never felt the need to switch. But I'm curious +2

Dani AI

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A short, practical addendum for anyone finding this 2022 thread later: Vivaldi is still actively developed (current stable at the time of writing is Vivaldi 7.8, Jan 29, 2026), so some early quirks mentioned here may already be fixed. (vivaldi.com)

If you’re seeing freezes, frequent hangs or sluggish UI (like described), try this focused checklist before jumping ship:

  • Update Vivaldi to the latest stable/snapshot.
  • Test in a new User or Guest profile to rule out profile corruption.
  • Disable all extensions, then re-enable them one-by-one to find a culprit.
  • Toggle hardware acceleration off/on to see if GPU interactions are the issue.
  • Open Vivaldi’s Task Manager (Shift+Esc) to spot heavy tabs or extensions, then clear cache or reset settings if needed.
  • If the problem is reproducible, collect steps and report it on Vivaldi’s support channels. (help.vivaldi.com)

On privacy: Vivaldi markets itself as “no profiling” and provides end-to-end encryption for sync, but their published privacy policy also documents minimal telemetry (e.g., a unique install ID and periodic status messages). Review the policy and the crash/telemetry settings if you need stricter controls. (vivaldi.com)

Quick context for readers: ’s note about pinch-zoom is a good reminder that Vivaldi exposes many UI and webpage controls — that granularity is a feature for power users (as appreciated) but can feel like bloat to others (as hinted). If the checklist above doesn’t help, capture a minimal repro and post it on Vivaldi’s help/forum so the developers can investigate. (help.vivaldi.com)

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Member Avatar for Dani

I like how it boasts on the splash page that it doesn't collect "excessive" user data.

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

"Excessive". Uh huh. I do understand that usage metrics, properly anonymized, could be useful. But I'd still like to know what is being shared.

BTW If you want you can have multiple tabs open in tiled mode. Not a feature I would use, but why not.

Edited by Reverend Jim
Member Avatar for pritaeas

I've tried it pre-beta and V1, so quite a while ago. At that point it was a very fast and nice browser to work with (for me). Unfortunately, they began adding all the useless (non-developer) crap Chrome, FF and Opera had (which I don't use), so I ditched it.

Update: 7 years ago apparently:
https://www.daniweb.com/community-center/geeks-lounge/threads/491028/vivaldi

Edited by pritaeas
Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

If you are referring to features like calendar and email, in the latest installer you can select to not install those features.

Member Avatar for Dani

"Excessive". Uh huh. I do understand that usage metrics, properly anonymized, could be useful. But I'd still like to know what is being shared.

I just find it amusing that the single biggest thing they have to boast about (at least according to their splash page) has to include the word “excessive” to be accurate. If I was their marketing copy department, I would be looking for something else to brag about that doesn’t require any qualifiers. Especially sillily ambiguous ones.

Member Avatar for markanderson_1

Vivaldi browser provides excellent features to improve your productivity. The fact that it allows us to download and open attachments from web pages is highly appreciated. Apart from that, the personalized features are also great. Overall a wonderful browser.

Member Avatar for bburd

I used Vivaldi 4 on different versions of macOS for about a year. Vivaldi 5 hangs too frequently for it to be useful to me. I've tried all kinds of tricks to figure out what's wrong -- logs, safe mode, no extensions, etc. Not sure what do to because I'd like to keep using Vivaldi.

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