Another year, another web browser. After years of being comfortable with Firefox I was thinking of switching to another web browser for my convenience. A little bit of history:

1. In 2013 I was using Firefox.
2. Then moved to Chrome because people said it's better.
3. Then tried some Chromium clones like SRWare Iron and Citrio (don't ask me why).
4. Then tried Opera, which was recently switched to Chromium.
5. Then moved to Internet Explorer 11 (no, I'm not joking)
6. Then moved again to Firefox, now with Australis.
7. Then moved again to Firefox Developer Edition 'cause it's way cooler!
8. Then coming back to Chrome for my obsession with Material Design.
9. Then tried again some Chromium clones like Baidu Spark Browser and Maxthon Browser (again, don't ask me why).
10. It's 2015 and I just got an Android phone and I used Samsung Internet (good ol' KitKat version).
11. Switched Samsung Internet to Firefox for Android (Fennec) but it was slow and buggy
12. In 2016 I changed my Android phone and installed Firefox since day one.
13. Switched from Windows 7 to Linux so I moved to Firefox (on desktop) 'cause it's the default.
14. Oh yeah finally I'm a contributor at webcompat.com!
15. Sometimes I have to use GNOME Web (WebKit-based) and Chrome for my tasks at webcompat.com
16. Sometimes I tried installing Opera and Vivaldi and Falkon (formerly Qupzilla) on Linux, too... As well as the all-new Samsung Internet on my Android device.
17. It's 2020 and I got an iPhone. Still used Safari instead of Firefox, Chrome...
18. Also learnt about Firefox Lockwise (previously Lockbox)
19. iOS 14 was released and I finally set Firefox as default browser!
20. It's 2021 and I thought trying Microsoft Edge on Linux is nice!
21. Used the all-new Microsoft Edge as the default in my Windows 10 machine, because I had problems with my Firefox config there...

So yeah, after about half a decade I've been mostly using one single web browser at all: Firefox. And I have used many of Firefox' services like Firefox Lockwise, Firefox Screenshots, and even Firefox Send! And you might be asking why this sudden move to Vivaldi. So now, here's a story...

What's wrong with Firefox today?

Firefox is still good, especially for novice users. But there are some features for power users which I want to have in Firefox. Remember that in Opera and Vivaldi you can pin sites on your sidebar? Firefox was testing a similar feature on their Test Pilot program but I thought it wasn't enough and as complete as Opera and Vivaldi. Not to mention that I was imagining a place where I have my web browsing, IDE, and my Terminal combined into one place! Well, that's sounds like a Konqueror's dream but Konqueror itself seems to be less modern and maintained, unlike those folks at Vivaldi!

Then, in 2015, I was praising Firefox a lot for their (legacy XUL-based) extensions. But these types of extensions are gone away for 2 good reasons:

• XUL extensions are a pain for Firefox devs to maintain compatibility with newer Firefox versions,
• Some security concerns, too (some plugins may intentionally hide or disable features in Firefox).

Check out the Tile Tabs WE, one of the Firefox extensions that was made to replace the older, XUL-based Tile Tabs extension which had become popular during the old days of Firefox. In the original Tile Tabs extension, tiled tabs are organized in one single window like this:

But now, due to the limitations of WebExtensions (aka. the de-facto and only way to develop Firefox extensions today), tiled tabs generated by Tile Tabs WE are equivalent to spawning a bunch of windows and tiling them, and the browser's tab bar clutters the overall experience like this:

This situation has become worse when Mozilla decided to remove the "Tab bar density" option in recent versions of Firefox as part of their visual refresh. And that means tab bars will be always big and fat as intended by designers. The consequence?

The tab bar greatly reduces the viewing area of the respective, tiled tabs. Except if I modify userChrome.css and stuff. Compared to how they all look like in Vivaldi:

Okay here's a comparison image. At least my taskbar is not freaked out by too many windows of Firefox...

I supposedly switched to Microsoft Edge, though.

Before switching to Vivaldi I was planning to switch instead to the all-new Microsoft Edge, just for curiosity. But Microsoft Edge back then had two problems in Linux:

1. "Sign In with Microsoft" was not available on Linux, and
2. There's a specific problem with my computer's (GNOME? KWallet?) keyring which causes the browser to reset all of my browsing data each time I reboot!

The latter one still bugs me when I was start using Vivaldi, but soon I have found my solution against that. At the end, even though that I've resolved the second problem, I'm still interested to use Vivaldi instead of Edge for their features, though.

And hence, Vivaldi!

Since July 2021, I am starting to try out Vivaldi. Fortunately, it was the time where Vivaldi 4.0 was released with new features including built-in calendar and mail. I haven't had any idea to use both of those features, especially when I was comfortable for using GNOME Calendar and Geary, respectively. However, since both apps seem to be problematic when I launched them from KDE Plasma and XFCE instead of GNOME, I decided to try and fell in love with Vivaldi.

I even tried to run Firefox and Vivaldi side-by-side. On one of my active laptops, I set Firefox as default and Vivaldi on the other one. And the result is seamless.

What's Next?

After trying both web browsers, I am currently planning to create my own "New Tab" page as well as a personal sync service not just to sync data between Firefox and Vivaldi, but also into other browsers like Safari and Samsung Internet! So imagine if my history data from Firefox can be merged altogether with Vivaldi, so Vivaldi can more accurately generate this graph of browsing history:

...or I can jump back where I left off from my Samsung Internet browser on my smartwatch:

...or even have a dedicated New Tab page where I can finally have all of my favorite things from SuperProductivity, daily.dev, and even my internal websites on one single page!