Last week, I installed and began using Vivaldi -- a more Opera-like gloss on Chromium -- on the Raspberry Pi in preference to basic Chromium. Here's a brief update on how that's working out:
- Vivaldi seems to load/render sites faster than regular Chromium, which is nice but not strictly necessary. The ARM-based Pi running Raspbian (a fork of Debian Linux) is, in general, slower than my AMD-based ThinkCentre running Kubuntu, but not to a degree, or in particular ways, that slow down my work (I tend to open a bunch of new tabs in background at once, and if they take a little longer to load, no biggie).
- Vivaldi has built-in ad and tracker blocking, meaning I don't have to run e.g. uBlock Origin for that stuff. The settings are controlled by a button on the left side of the URL bar, so nicely accessible.
- As a Chromium build, Vivaldi will run most Chrome extensions, but I haven't loaded a whole bunch of them. This probably contributes to the speedier work.
- Two work-related things do bug me. One I can do something about and am doing it -- opening multiple bookmarks at the same time creates new tabs in reverse order. Since my workflow goes a particular way, I'm having to rearrange groups of bookmarks. The other is a "get used to it" thing -- opening something in a new tab automatically goes to that tab, with no setting for changing it (I checked/searched, and a number of users consider this an issue), unless you choose "open in background tab" on right-click. I'd prefer that just be an automated setting rather than a separate right-click option, but I can deal with it.
- On the gaming and entertainment side, I'm having trouble getting Vivaldi to handle WebGL (for certain games), or Widevine (for e.g. watching Netflix videos). The former is a minor irritation. As for the latter, I didn't even know I could watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. in Linux until I came across the subject while looking up the WebGL problem. And I did get Widevine working in Chromium proper, so that's a win if I want to use it.
Overall, I'm pretty damn happy with Vivaldi. Happier than with Chromium proper, at least so far.
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