Vivaldi

April 27, 2026 • Louie Mantia

I used Vivaldi in earnest for a few days. While I believe the intentions to be great overall, what I dislike about it seems to be the result of deliberate decisions, either fundamental or principled, that are unlikely to change over time.

Upsides

You can customize virtually anything about the UI.
It’s not made by Apple, Google, or Microsoft.

Downsides

The default settings are geared toward power-users, elevating features that most people probably don’t care about, making customizing mandatory in practice.
The vast array of settings are split between so many panes and are very difficult to understand and navigate, even for myself.
Almost nothing feels like a native Mac app, because it really isn’t one. For example, resizing a window causes the page to spend significant time redrawing.
It’s yet another Chromium-based browser.

I was looking at Vivaldi after growing tired of the search engine options in Safari. I want to try alternatives that aren't any of the five offered: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Google, and Yahoo. At least four have been degrading consistently.

It’s wild that I am even considering a new browser just because of that one thing. Yet, the ability for others to meaningfully contribute to Safari is limited to extensions, which are not able to alter this list in Safari’s preferences.

I suspect I’m not the only one shopping around for better interfaces for the web. Apple is the only WebKit browser for macOS that I’m aware of. And that’s a shame.

17:40 Johannes tells me Orion by Kagi is a WebKit browser for macOS, so I’ll give that a try!