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Vivaldi impressions

I tried version 6.8 of Vivaldi on macOS.

What I liked

  • Ad and tracker blocking can be turned on during the onboarding flow.

  • Built-in RSS reader makes it easy to discover and subscribe to feeds. You can preview a feed before subscribing:

    Screenshot of a web browser showing a preview of the different items in an RSS feed.
    Figure 1: Vivaldi’s RSS feed preview.

What I didn’t like

  • Laggy UI animations.

  • Bing as default search engine. If you switch to Google, they try to nudge you towards one of their partner search engines.

    Screenshot of a web browser's start page. At the top there's a callout asking the user to choose a partner search engine to help support the company. There's an open drop-down list with four options: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and Startpage.com.
    Figure 2: Vivaldi’s sponsored search engines.

  • Start page that shows sponsored bookmarks by default.

    Screenshot of a web browser's start page. Below a search box there's a grid of bookmarks, including Vivaldi Social, Vivaldi Community, Amazon, Booking.com, Yelp, eBay, Walmart, and others.
    Figure 3: Vivaldi’s sponsored bookmarks.

  • Search bar that shows sponsored URLs by default.

    Screenshot of a web browser. The user has typed letter 'M' in the address bar, and it has been auto-completed to Macys.com. There's an open drop-down list below the address bar, with an option group at the top that says 'Best Result (Direct Match)', and an option for Macys.com with a pill on the right that says 'Direct Match'.
    Figure 4: Vivaldi’s sponsored search results.

Business model

They wrote about their business model on their blog: What’s Vivaldi’s business model?

  • Partner deals with search engines.
  • Sponsored bookmarks on start page.
  • Sponsored URLs in any of the browser’s search fields.