I've just this morning given up on Vivaldi. I'd switched to it last week as part of my recent search to find a browser that doesn't annoy the hell out of me. So, at the risk of going off on a ranty tangent...

I have been using Yandex since forever as it's been pretty good on OSX and is the least shit Android browser I've found [Damning with faint praise, indeed!] However, over the past several months it's become slower and slower, to add to its longterm ongoing annoyances such as randomly switching parts of the interface to Russian.

So I went searching for an alternative

Anyway...

First of all I tried Brave.

1: On the plus side, it was nice and 'snappy'. I used Brave for about a week until I found that I couldn't login to Google Photos at all using Brave. I'd be logged into my Google account and could view Drive, YouTube, etc. But as soon as I switched to Photos, I'd get an error telling me I couldn'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't work.

2: Brave's 'Shields' 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'm good to go. I found myself constantly having to turn off Shields on sites to un-break them. But couldn't find any setting to just disable them globally, as more hassle than they're worth.

So, onto Vivaldi.

Not as 'snappy' as Brave. But 'snappier' than Yandex. However, there too some show-stopping annoyances soon revealed themselves:

People complain about Brave'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.

1: The first time I fired up Vivaldi, it stuck a load of shitty icons for websites I'd never visit in 100 years on my homescreen. Instead of a nice button saying "Get rid of this sponsored crap" I had to annoyingly dismiss each one, one by one.

2: Vivaldi has a similarly shady habit of autocompleting what I enter in the address bar with sites I've never visited in my life.

I'm so used to typing cr.. in my address bar and having it autocomplete to cryptocompare.com then hitting RETURN to go there. So it's absolutely infuriating that Vivaldi autocompletes this every time to crowdspring.com --a site I've never visited in my life.

Ditto my habitual ne... + RETURN to take me here to news.ycombinator.com. Vivaldi automcompletes that to newlifeauctions.com another site I've never knowingly visited in my life and which looks like some spam site that's fallen through a time-warp from the 1980s.

This annoyance is compounded by the fact I can find no way to stop these autocompletion suggestions. No matter how many times I type ne... in the adress bar and then [annoyingly] have to select news.ycombinator.com from further down the popup suggetions menu, Vivaldi will still aoutcomplete to newlifeauctions.com --every fuckin' time!

It's like a browser which brags about its privacy features, but has the spam built-in!

3: I can't rearrange the extension icons on the toolbar. Vivaldi's help forums say [on Mac] to hold down SHIFT and drag them. This doesn'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'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's irritating to have to go against that muscle memory.

4: Oh. and the crowning turd in the cess-pit. And a major reason why I'm complaining about all this stuff here. I can't login to Vivaldi's support forums to report any of these annoyances/bugs because it's been giving me an 'Internal Server Error..' since the weekend. Even though [as with Brave and Google] I'm shown as logged into Vivaldi if I visit any of their other account related pages.

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 'problem' sites I've tried so far. And, once it's actually up and running, it doesn't seem to be noticeably slower than all those Chrome-based alternatives.

TLDR: Why are all browsers so shite, these days?