Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Vivaldi
by Erik
Installation:
When I installed Linux Lite, it shipped with Chrome. As I do not want to be Google-linked, I opted to uninstall it, but what should I replace it with on a lightweight distro? I run Firefox and Vivaldi on my daily driver, so I opted for that. However, my daily driver runs Ubuntu with Snaps and there is a reason I opted for Linux Lite on my ageing machine. I added deb-get to the system and checked the list. Yep, it was on the list, so installation was as easy as: ‘deb-get install vivaldi-stable‘. I tested it out on Linux Mint as well, and it installed in a flash.
Now Vivaldi is based on Chromium, so all the Google bits-n-bobs should be removed. However to be completely rid of Google, you need to turn off the Google meet extension, which is on by default, and the ‘form autofill assistant’, etcetera, so you still need to put work in. Being Chromium means that you can still install add-ons from the Chrome web store. Vivaldi claims to be more privacy focussed, but since the code is not 100% open source, we will never know. The thing that bothers me is that the parts that are not open source seem trivial to me, so what are they hiding in there? That’s just my opinion and does not stop me from liking it. Once installed, there is a setup that runs on your first launch and you need to make your choices on the look-and-feel of Vivaldi (you can change it all later).
If you click too fast, there are pips along the right-hand side for you to navigate with. Which I realised were covered by a “hidden” panel, when adding the screenshots afterwards. Oh well… Vivaldi is more than a browser and you can set up your email and calendar and news feeds all within your browser. I used to use this option, but a browser is really heavy on memory, so if you are on the low end, I suggest that you do not. (It is under “productivity features” in the settings if you would like to change it.)
When you click the final button, you are treated to a “get started” video. Because the developers used to work for Opera, you will find similarities between Vivialdi and pre-Chrome Opera.
The first thing you will notice is that the default search engine is Startpage, which was a nice departure from Bing and DuckDuckGo in the past. I can still use DDG right from the search bar, by prefixing any query with a “d” and a space. The Vivaldi developers have made it really easy for you to add more search engines and add prefixes, right in the settings. The default reverse image search engine is Bing. To test them we loaded the 2025 issue of Asimov, from Startpage. Then, using the right-click search image, function. The goal was to find the artist. Google was the only one capable of doing so, ignoring the words, while Bing and Yandex and others seemed to get hung up on the words, showing us more of Azimov anthologies, so choose wisely.
Vivaldi still comes with a zoom slider in the bottom right of the application, much like LibreOffice. We tested the default key bindings of CTRL++ and CTRL+- and CRTL+0, and they also still worked out of the box. Maybe this is a good segue to talk about Vivaldi’s excellent keyboard shortcuts. Backspace is enabled by default! Though it is also enabled in FF by default again, there was a period that it was not. The privacy screen when you need it, or need to take a break, is still on CTRL+. , and not only blanks your viewing window, but also your tabs. For me, it still has the bug, where, if you were playing a video, and you click on the resume icon, the tab stays muted and I have to hunt for the tiny mute icon.
As I translate a lot, for FCM news, I find that Vivaldi has the easiest means of translating only a piece of text, right from the right-hand bar, as sometimes you do not want the whole page translated, as the name of something like tails, for instance, can get weird. My only ‘nice to have’ here, that I have in other browsers, is the ability to download a few languages for offline translation. Another feature I enjoy is the option to open pop-ups in their own tabs, that way you don’t end up with one in the background that you have no knowledge of.
For power users with lots of memory (my Mac for work had 32GB, so it worked there, but not really for home.. meaning I turn on ‘memory saver’, hahaha), you have the option of having more than one row of tabs in multiple workspaces. It is called tab stacking, where you drag one tab on top of another, then whenever you click that tab again, it opens a second row of tabs (sub tabs?) that you have stacked within the main tab. You also get the option to ‘pin’ tabs , where they become tiny, move to the start of the tab row and only display the ‘favicon’.
I like customizing, and I know a lot of you don’t, so I customize the heck out of Vivaldi and poke into everything I can and this is another plus for me. My left-hand side bar becomes a lot more empty. Speaking of the sidebar, I have delved into Vivaldi social, and while I don’t have the time for things like that, I do appreciate them. I have found answers to issues I have had on there, but it also incorporates tik-tok style brain-rot, so if you have rugrats, I suggest you remove that. If you get addicted to scrolling easily, you may also want to remove that.
While the smart hue feature is old hat by now, it still impresses some folks, but I prefer a stable color for my browser. If you were to type ‘hue’ into settings, you will find that it can integrate with Phillips hue, not that I have any of that to test. My internet connection is capped, so I also appreciate that it does not come with pictures on new tabs enabled by default. There is nothing so depressing as browsing four tabs just to empty your temporary internet junk and find that it is a few hundred megabytes from pre-caching lots of pictures.
If you think we were unfair, misc@fullcirclemagazine.org