A new – faster – browser

I don’t generally promote products, but I’m making a big exception for something that actually makes the world a better place.

I just downloaded the new Vivaldi browser, and it’s very slick. I’m a die-hard Firefox user (Chrome uses up too many of my system resources – if I have more than one tab open, it slows my system noticeably), but Vivaldi “feels” much more streamlined and responsive. I really like it.

It looks like a hybrid between Chrome and Opera (I was a diehard Opera fan for many years, but it was considerably slower and clunkier than my both FF and Chrome (even more than IE, which is saying volumes), and I could only use it for certain things. I used it “on the side” to access sites that I visited infrequently — I stored all my passwords on it, so I wouldn’t have to remember all the logins, and I used it about once a month.

Vivaldi reminds me a little bit of Opera — for good reason, since the creator(s) were once author(s) of Opera. V has the same feel that O once did, and that’s a good thing, since O’s interactions used to be simply awesome.

V also reminds me a bit of Chome, and that’s because it’s built on Chromium and has an interface that can be customized to be very Chrome-like. If you’re not a tech person, it’s not going to mean anything, but the fact that they got away from the Opera approach (which used to be great – the first version of their browser could fit on a 3-1/2″ floppy disk, which was a marvel, back in the day)… that actually bodes well for it, because Opera went off in a direction that clearly stopped working, years ago.

I’ve had increasing problems with Firefox being slow and clunky. It could be due to the handful of extensions I have installed, but I can’t do without those, so I figured I was stuck.

That could be the same thing that happens, if I should ever install Vivaldi extensions, but the solution may be to keep my gussied-up FF along with a lean-n-mean Vivaldi, and use each for what it’s good for.

It’s a fantastic browser, built by people who specialize in browsers — not coders who were hired by a browser company. There’s a difference, just for the record.

You can get Vivaldi here: https://download.vivaldi.com/stable/Vivaldi.1.0.435.42.exe