Opera used to be a fantastic web browser, with a custom high-performance Presto rendering engine and features like tabbed windows that didn't show up in competing browsers until years later. However, the modern Opera browser is a shadow of its former self, reliant on chasing trends and meme advertis...
Vivaldi has been my browser of choice for years as well. Fantastic product in my experience. I've sadly forced myself to start using firefox and librewolf in an attempt support alternatives to chromium based browsers. Firefox and co. are fine, but I'm still reaching for features and options from vivaldi that just don't exist in firefox without a maze of incompatible and poorly maintained plugins.
No need to support firefox, they get 1/2 a billion dollars each year from Google :D
We're at a point where most of the browsers are just rotten sadly, now it's just a question of what is less worse than the others. With the coming of manifest v3 I don't know if Vivaldi will still be worth it to me, I hope it will because even if I'd really like to use librewolf or another good fork of firefox..it's just so lackluster compared to what Vivaldi offers, especially since I use a lot of its features.
Stop with this bullshit. They aren't influenced by Google in any ways that actually matter. Google is effectively paying to make sure that there is a competitor.
I never said that, actually just said exactly what you did : that Google pay them to still have a competitor.
But that's a big problem, because that make them competitors just in name, and using their browser won't change that sadly. Another problem is the lucrative part of Mozilla that have made a number of bad decisions over the years with firefox, and are partly to blame as to how it fell out of favour.
To be clear Firefox is far from being the worst browser out there, it's not what I am saying, and it can have forks, we can also edit most of the crap out of it wich is great. But it would be silly to consider it a spotless software run by saints.
That's all I am saying.
I would even go back to it or (better) a fork of it if I could get the features I use in Vivaldi without using countless and broken (or non savy) extentions, because I'd still find that better than using something based on chromium (even if there is a dedicated and seemingly good intended team behind it).
But I would still not find it ideal, not without that lucrative side of Mozilla hanging onto firefox and that damn Google pay.
@BarrierWithAshes Just use Firefox. There's plenty of stuff that can be achieved just through add-ons and switching various settings in about:config. Only thing that's missing is an integrated free VPN, but I guess there are better alternatives anyway if you want more privacy online.