Browser recommendation, or Why you should move to Vivaldi
Tags: productivity, discuss
Published: 2019-05-03 18:16:55

---
title: Browser recommendation, or Why you should move to Vivaldi
published: true
description: Vivaldi is a great browser, and here's why I love it over any other browser.
tags: productivity, discuss
---

Most of us are guilty of this. We keep too many tabs open. It gets difficult to find which one we were looking for, and the machine can get slow or hot from having to deal with so many tabs, auto-refreshes, data coming in, etc. We just don't know how powerful and personal our browser can be.

That’s why I want to recommend my favorite browser, not the most popular one, but by FAR my favorite. [Vivaldi](https://vivaldi.com) ❤️

> BTW, this isn't sponsored or anything. I just really love the browser and I feel that you might benefit from trying it out and discovering the great features it has. 

## Why it's great

Let’s go back to the having-too-many-tabs-open thing. Some are related to work, others to a project you’re building, then there's social media too, and something you’re researching, a reading or watching list, etc. Well, if you do the switch, you’ll get **Tab Stacking** — just select related tabs with shift, then right click, and select “new tab stack”. This will group all of the tabs you selected in the space of one. You can also rename it, to quickly see what it’s about.

And what about performance? Here comes my favorite feature: **Tab Hibernation**. You can put tabs “to sleep”, so they are still there – but aren’t taking any memory or network. When you go to the hibernated tab, it will load as usual. This has dramatically improved performance in my daily work/study/research life.
Just to prove the point, I just un-hibernated my around 20 tabs, including a few instances of youtube, some CodePen, github, a couple dev.to, some articles, etc. Vivaldi was taking up about 20% CPU. Then, after selecting "Hibernate Background Tabs" (yes, you can hibernate everything else with one click), it was down to under 2%. Being honest, 20 tabs open is low for me — I just cleaned up yesterday. Usually, it's more around 50 tabs. So you can imagine the difference it makes if you're also using other apps other than the browser— the difference can sometimes be 60%+ to 1% CPU with a single click.


I could talk all day about Vivaldi, that’s how good it is. Some of the highlights for me include great themes and impressive customization — you can even select how round the corners should be, or changing theme at set times throughout the day (I have mine to change as the day progresses, with different colors to fit the light and mood), tabs on the top, right, left, or bottom (I have mine on the right), customizable panel where you can add any websites you want, on-page tools like blurring, grayscale, image tilting, CSS debugging; powerful dev tools, tab stack tiling (you can have multiple tabs tiled as you want them, vertically, horizontally, as rectangles, etc), hide all the UI with one shortcut, saving tabs as sessions you can come back to later, different users with different everything... I could go on. You can use it fully with keyboard only, I find it's faster this way. Anything you want, it's there.

<img src="https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/i8oboxadtoega66eob9v.png" height="300px">


## The cons
Because, let's be fair, nobody's perfect.

### Support
And, by support, I mean, Shopify. You can't edit a Shopify site using Vivaldi. (I haven't checked in a few months, though, to be fair.) But when I had to work on a Shopify site, I had to go back to Opera temporarily, because Shopify didn't support Vivaldi. 

### The looks
that people from support chats may give you. It's untold, but it's there. "Have you tried using Chrome?" or "It works on Chrome", as if the issue was related to the browser (it isn't, I already checked, no I don't have to check again, ugh ok I checked again and it's not working, see?). But this has more to do with being a woman requesting help, particularly being blonde. 

### The shock
When you have to use a different browser or computer. You look around, and see, there's only Chrome. [sigh]

### ~~The lack of mobile app~~
~~If you are a person who cares about syncing browser content between your computer and phone, well, Vivaldi won't be able to help you yet. Although they are developing the apps, they're not ready. I personally use Firefox Focus on my phone, and don't care about the syncing.~~

> Update: Vivaldi now has an app for Android. Woohoo!


## The alternatives

Vivaldi is the best browser I’ve ever used (and I’m a heavy browser hoarder). But no browser beats the customization that’s Vivaldi offers. Try it out for a couple of weeks. I highly, very highly recommend it.

In terms of other browsers, my second favorite is Firefox. It's Firefox, it's great. And then, Opera, with built-in free VPN and ad blocker. It was my main browser for months. 
After these, every other browser is just... OK. 



*Feel free to tell me why your browser is better. As I said, I love hoarding browsers and trying our different features, and while I'm not looking to change — Vivaldi is better in most ways, I would love to hear what your browser of choice is, and why. And, if you'd like to know if there's a feature before downloading Vivaldi, I'll try my best at answering.*