Vivaldi 5.5 brings Tasks Panel, Mail/Calendar improvements and more
I&#x27;ve just this morning given up on Vivaldi.  I&#x27;d switched to it last week as part of my recent search to find a browser that doesn&#x27;t annoy the hell out of me.  So, at the risk of going off on a ranty tangent...<p>I have been using Yandex since forever as it&#x27;s been pretty good on OSX and is the least shit Android browser I&#x27;ve found [Damning with faint praise, indeed!] However, over the past several months it&#x27;s become slower and slower, to add to its longterm ongoing annoyances such as randomly switching parts of the interface to Russian.<p>So I went searching for an alternative<p>Anyway...<p>First of all I  tried Brave.<p>1: On the plus side, it was nice and &#x27;snappy&#x27;. I used Brave for about a week until I  found that I couldn&#x27;t login to Google Photos at all using Brave. I&#x27;d be logged into my Google account and could view Drive, YouTube, etc. But as soon as I switched to Photos, I&#x27;d get an error telling me I couldn&#x27;t login until I cleared cookies [even though I was already logged in. My ugly mug was there at the top of the page]. And, needless to say, clearing cookies didn&#x27;t work.<p>2: Brave&#x27;s &#x27;Shields&#x27; feature breaks a ton of websites.  I already use uBlock Origin and, over the years, have it tweaked to perfection, so I just import my uBO settings into $NEW_BROWSER and I&#x27;m good to go. I found myself constantly having to turn off Shields on sites to un-break them. But couldn&#x27;t find any setting to just disable them globally, as more hassle than they&#x27;re worth.<p>So, onto Vivaldi.<p>Not as &#x27;snappy&#x27; as Brave. But &#x27;snappier&#x27; than Yandex. However, there too some show-stopping annoyances soon revealed themselves:<p>People complain about Brave&#x27;s dubious pracitces re all the crypto bollox etc. But, this is pretty easy to switch off in settings.  And those same people often recommend Vivaldi instead as being less shady.<p>1: The first time I fired up Vivaldi, it stuck a load of shitty icons for websites I&#x27;d never visit in 100 years on my homescreen. Instead of a nice button saying &quot;Get rid of this sponsored crap&quot; I had to annoyingly dismiss each one, one by one.<p>2: Vivaldi has a similarly shady habit of autocompleting what I enter in the address bar with sites I&#x27;ve never visited in my life.<p>I&#x27;m so used to typing <i>cr..</i> in my address bar and having it autocomplete to <i>cryptocompare.com</i> then hitting RETURN to go there. So it&#x27;s absolutely infuriating that Vivaldi autocompletes this every time to <i>crowdspring.com</i> --a site I&#x27;ve never visited in my life.<p>Ditto my habitual <i>ne...</i> + RETURN to take me here to <i>news.ycombinator.com</i>. Vivaldi automcompletes that to <i>newlifeauctions.com</i> another site I&#x27;ve never knowingly visited in my life and which looks like some spam site  that&#x27;s fallen through a time-warp from the 1980s.<p>This annoyance is compounded by the fact I can find no way to stop these autocompletion suggestions. No matter how many times I type <i>ne...</i> in the adress bar and then [annoyingly] have to select <i>news.ycombinator.com</i> from further down the popup suggetions menu, Vivaldi will still aoutcomplete to <i>newlifeauctions.com</i> --every fuckin&#x27; time!<p>It&#x27;s like a browser which brags about its privacy features, but has the spam built-in!<p>3: I can&#x27;t rearrange the extension icons on the toolbar. Vivaldi&#x27;s help forums say [on Mac] to hold down SHIFT and drag them. This doesn&#x27;t work at all. Holding down CMD and dragging them looks like it should work. The extension icons move and a blue insertion bar appears where they&#x27;re going to move to. But when I release them, they just go back to where they were. A minor annoyance maybe. But when I have my extension icons arranged in a certain order on every browser I use, it&#x27;s irritating to have to go against that muscle memory.<p>4: Oh. and the crowning turd in the cess-pit. And a major reason why I&#x27;m complaining about all this stuff here.  I can&#x27;t login to Vivaldi&#x27;s support forums to report any of these annoyances&#x2F;bugs because it&#x27;s been giving me an &#x27;Internal Server Error..&#x27; since the weekend. Even though [as with Brave and Google] I&#x27;m shown as logged into Vivaldi if I visit any of their other account related pages.<p>In sheer desperation to find a web browser that is not broken in some way or another, this morning I opened up Firefox, for the first time in months.  It still takes longer to open than any other browser I use [so much for the messianic promise that re-writing your application in Rust would fix everything!]. But, at least it seems to work on all the &#x27;problem&#x27; sites I&#x27;ve tried so far. And, once it&#x27;s actually up and running, it doesn&#x27;t seem to be noticeably slower than all those Chrome-based alternatives.<p><i>TLDR:  Why are all browsers so shite, these days?</i>