I know we aren’t allowed to use Chrome.

Who says? Use whatever you want, if you want to use Chrome then use it, nobody is stopping you.

As for Vivaldi, I personally think it’s the best Chromium browser out there, highly customizable with all the good stuff from old Opera without none of the garbage from current Opera, plus it seems to be reasonably respectful of your privacy. Their only mistake was building it on Chromium.

We’ve decided you’re only allowed to use Lynx from now on.

Use whatever you want?

It’s all Chromium, the same browser.

It’s chromium but has a special place in my heart because it’s made by the og Opera people, when Opera used its own engine. I still use Firefox but if I ever switched it would probably be to Vivaldi.

It’s top on my list of Chromium browsers

You can use any browser you want, just be aware of what the downsides are when you do.

The issue with Chrome and Chromium based broswers is the power that Google exerts over the internet via the Blink engine. Although other companies use the same technology, Google controls it and shapes it for it’s own commerical gains.

The other big alternative is also proprietary with Apple’s Sarfari and WebKit ecosystem.

Vivaldi is a nice browser but it is still run by a private company and it still monetises you to an extent. In vivaldi’s case it is currently fairly inocuous - they have referral deals with search engines for the default search, and deals with companies for default bookmarks. But it seems to be currently a more trustworthy browser. Ultimately though, it is part of the Blink ecosystem and supports Google’s increasing domination of the browser engine space.

Mozilla and Firefox remains the only truly independent browser, run in a not-for-profit and fully open source way, on the Gecko engine. It’s existance helps maintain the neutral aspects of the Web - instead of sites being designed for one browser, it encourages web site and services to be truly standards compliant. Firefox monetise users in a similar way to Vivaldi but that money is used to actually maintain and develop Gecko and other Mozilla technologies, while Vivaldi use that money to maintain Vivaldi the company - they don’t need to fund most of Blink as it’s made available by Google.

But no one is obliged to support Firefox or open technologies. It’s a personal choice what browser you use and there are many valid reasons beyond open standards to chose a browser. I use Firefox for multiple reasons; I genuinely like it and am used to it, but I actually also use Vivaldi and even Chrome on occasions (sometimes to view crapily designed ad heavy or tracking sites without having to disable lots of privacy extensions etc in firefox to make it work; I use Chrome as a bog standard sandbox when I want to dump crap sites out of my main browser but still want to quickly view it for whatever reason).

Pick a browser you like and don’t feel guilty if that happens to be chrome based.

It’s the best Chromium browser. Company seems like it’s run by decent people who listen to their users.

I use Vivaldi and it works fine for me. You can block ads and trackers and it’s fast.

That’s all I need.

You can use whatever you want, tbh, you’ll just be judged. What browser is best really depends on what’s important for you.

In terms of features and functionality, Vivaldi is on a league of it’s own. No other mainstream browser can compete. Edge from Microsoft takes the second place (no, really). Everything else is far behind on third place. (I don’t know about opera though, haven’t seen it in a decade)

In terms of privacy, the picture is very different. Also depends on what you consider to be an invasion of privacy (is phoning-home bad? Is telemetry bad? Is allowing cookies bad?) some browsers do one, others do others. If everything is bad, then Firefox is the king here.

If you don’t care about any of that and wants something that just works, maybe safari I guess?

Any recommendation you get here will usually take in account what the recommenders’ think is important but your opinion might be different.

Ps: Chromium bases browsers don’t necessarily pack in everything that Google does. Most of them are actually forks that still get to have a say in what they do or don’t.

I think vivaldi is respectful of the users privacy, and they are very transparent. If privacy is important to you, they have a number of settings which can be toggled to make it more private and secure: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/privacy-settings/

The rendering engine is chromium, and that’s a deal breaker for some people. If you don’t care about that, then I think it probably ranks right up there with Firefox.

It’s about the rendering engines, not the browser, really. More is better.

Ignore the fanbois here. Vivaldi is solid. I will ditch it like an old sock if they end up having to adopt the new standards Google is pushing though. I’m confident Vivaldi will fight doing so until bitter end. I hope they are even willing to switch engines if needbe.

I’ve been using it for a while because I like the forward and back arrows at the bottom and Firefox on Android was doing some weird stuff (freezing up and whatnot) at one point.

Vivaldi is pretty good. Henry from Techlore seems to like it. Also, while it is proprietary, the source code is available to view, audit, and compile.