Around the turn of the millennium the browser wars were a thing. The first browser war saw Netscape Navigator unsuccessfully defend against the new Microsoft Internet Explorer. After a few years the remains of Netscape Navigator were forged into a new browser called Phoenix, soon renamed to Firebird, and finally to Firefox. I, however, stayed strongly in camp Opera during this time.

Opera was developed by a Norwegian company by the same name, and it was by far the most innovative browser of the time. They were the first ones to introduce tabs, a speed dial window, customizable shortcuts, quick search bar, and, my favorite, mouse gestures: to go back in the history, press and hold the right mouse button, swipe left, and release. Extremely simple and efficient, and there were gestures for all the other commands you could wish for, too. Opera also recognized the importance of a community and successfully ran the My Opera site for years.

My Opera was, unfortunately, shut down in 2014. Then, two years later in 2016, Opera was sold to China, and I stopped using it. In the same year, however, the former CEO of Opera Software released the first stable version of a new browser called Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is to me the spiritual successor of Opera. You get the familiar full customizability and a bunch of features out of the box that other browsers can only have as plugins, if even that. Notoriously, Google recently basically removed the extremely popular uBlock Origin ad blocker from their plugin store, obviously because showing ads to you is their primary business. 😬 Other than ad blocking and tracker blocking, Vivaldi has, for example, a feed reader, tiling & stacking of tabs, the aforementioned mouse gestures, themes, and much more.

I recently wrote about the Kagi Search, to which someone who read it could’ve wondered if I use the Chrome browser anyway, in which case my privacy wouldn’t be any more protected with Kagi than it is with Google. I do need Chrome for work, but at home I use Vivaldi and haven’t signed in to my Google account with it. I’m under no illusion that Google wouldn’t still be able to track me, but at least I don’t need to make it trivial to them.

If you’ve been looking for a browser that puts you in control, Vivaldi is worth a try. Get it from vivaldi.com to give it a spin!