numimyon

In the light of recent Google decisions like abandoning URLs, the “new” Chrome design (with the round tabs Firefox had 5 years ago) or the recently introduced auto-logon to Google sync, the idea of a “Chrome browser without Google” is becoming more and more attractive ... time to give Vivaldi another try, a project started in 2015 by Opera co-founder Jon Tetzchner.

After downloading the 2.0 release candidate I must say I'm really impressed – Vivaldi gives you the advantages of Chrome (100% Blink/Chrome compatibility including extensions and dev tools) without the privacy issues (sync is always end to end encrypted and not stored on Google servers), and adds more features on top than I can even list here, just have a look at the Vivaldi features page instead.

Vivaldi 2.0 RC1 already feels very mature, fast and stable. The “killer feature” for me is the URL bar autocomplete, which is the fastest and best I've experienced in any web browser so far. The only thing I'm missing is synchronization of search engines, but this has been promised for a later release.

Long story short, if you are looking for a modern, innovative, customizable browser beyond the big names, look no further – give Vivaldi 2.0 a try and you'll never look back!

PS: to use this on Archlinux or Manjaro, install vivaldi-snapshot and vivaldi-snapshot-ffmpeg-codecs from the AUR (the second one will take quite long to compile, so alternatively you can also get the packages from from the unofficial herecura repo – worked fine for me, although Manjaro isn't supported).