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Main difference to casual users will be extremely slow UI (running javascript code). Closing tabs, going full screen on YT - those operations can take over 1 second.

This is Vivaldi in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCA2qIIG1M

I’ve said this many times. Also the UI is buggy and many things you expect to work don’t (like dragging a link or a word to the tab bar to open a new tab). It’s such a shame because other browsers such as edgium and brave are faring much better
Yes even I felt the slowness when doing basic features like opening tabs.

It's a great browser with lots of built in features. You don't have to use (or trust) more extensions. But too slow and overwhelming with all the shortcuts and features.

I love all Vivaldi features and customization potential. I still use it despite the slowness :(

The worst part is Vivaldi devs dont see a problem. 16 core 4GHz Ryzen with 32BG ram and some UI actions still take ~ second :/ all because UI is naive single threaded javascript.

I had the same experience so I switched to Edge when I need a Chromium browser. Still use Firefox as my main browser though
In many ways, opting for Chromium was a poor choice by Vivaldi as it turned off many people from it due to Google's privacy invasive practice, and overall bad reputation in this area. These fears turned out to be even more true after Google integrated and intertwined Chrome with more of its services, and even went so far to cripple ad-blockers on it. It's also resource hog.

They should have opted for Webkit (or even Gecko, even though their code base is a mess). They also need to dump their Web UI and switch to native UI of the OS.

I really miss Opera (pre-blink version).

I think Vivaldi is js/react shop right now. They have problems anytime a bug in native code pops up, like video codecs. Windows 7 video decoding has been partially broken for 3 years now with no fixes in sight, Big Sur video decoding is also broken. Chromium was a safe bet, and js lets them iterate fast, but the quality of code in their Web UI leaves a lot to be desired. Still, they are the only game in town when it comes to browsers you can just inject your code to change UI on the fly, modding it to your heart content. As a bonus they have no problem ripping out all of Google tracking/spying code.

My biggest problem with Vivaldi is the interface between developers and users. They have no QA to speak of (repeatedly reintroducing same bugs, claiming to fix something while its not fixed, introducing trivial bugs with new features, failing to reproduce most bugs), most likely no automated unit testing, and no public accessible bug tracking system.

The way you report bugs is, I shit you not:

- fill out a form

- receive random number

- receive single automated confirmation

- post in obscure thread on their forum to ask for some Vivaldi employee to MANUALLY check what is happening with said bug from time to time.

As you can imagine not very conductive to a healthy development process, not to mention costing them a ton of time wasted on duplicates and replication time.

Imo this, together with recent move to remove Vivaldi from UA string are business decisions aimed at obscuring how they are doing. Internal company structures, not showing how (not)many employees they have, speed of development, company trajectory, user traction, deployment numbers, etc.

The biggest mistake of the decade from Mozilla was to not invest in extracting and encapsulating Firefox's rendering and js engines. Creating a Firefox clone is very hard. Well established browsers like PaleMoon are cursed to lag gehind Firefox because of that.
That was a feature, not a bug - once the millions of dollars started pouring in, they weren't really interested in anyone taking their code and building competing browsers with it.
I love Vivaldi.

I'm using it as my daily driver now as I just don't trust Google.

(I did use Firefox as my daily driver for quite a while in the past few months, and it's really good. I'm afraid it doesn't debug the web app I'm working on nearly as well as Chrome -- I think something is misconfigured with our Sourcemap settings -- and that has made it slide from my first choice).

One thing I especially love is Vivaldi still carries forward the mouse gestures I learned in Opera years ago, and they work so much better built-in than trying to use an extension/plugin.

its literally just brave but worse https://brave.com
As a spiritual successor to Opera its a lot better when it comes to useful features.
Yeah, no.

I wouldn't touch brave with a 10 foot pole.