It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
Vivaldi is Chromium based but with a team that works towards reducing the privacy and usability impact of running something Chromium based. Retains support for adblockers etc, after Google severely limiting that functionality in Chrome itself. Supports Chrome extensions like usual - better than Chrome itself, now.
There is an inherent cost to internet freedom from using chromium browsers. It gives Google, which controls the back-end, leverage to redefine how the internet works. It’s not as though they haven’t already done it on multiple occasions.
People will say things like “some websites run better on Chrome” as though that’s a selling point and not a red flag.
I’m not saying no one should use it or develop on it, but you have to be okay with the real cost.
Especially with their mobile browser! They do a good job of actually keeping up with user feature requests and error reports.