Looks like the Slackbuilds site has the widevine now as a download. Thanks Alex

Firefox was annoying me after many years of being quite happy with it so I thought I'd give Vivaldi another try.

Wow, vast improvement over the last time I tried it. Haven't fired up Firefox since.

Thanks to all involved for a really good alternative.

When I brought it up, of course, I couldn't find one of these, but just now stumbled across this one another board while running Vivaldi. Notice it is reporting Vivaldi as "Chrome."

Since I am back from vacation it looks like I have a few things in this thread I should reply to and/or address but it is late now in Oslo, so that will have to be tomorrow.

In the mean time I followed slalik's lead and updated latest-vivaldi.sh to handle Widevine automatically as well.

[Edit]: I just (@Thu Jan 3 20:02 CET 2019) tweaked the script again slightly as I realised that my method could fail in some minor cases.

Thanks for this. I see you took a slightly different approach than me (which is absolutely fine!).

Yes, because it is running Chromium base, some sites see it as Chrome/Chromium. Others will see it as Vivaldi.

Sure you can do that if you want but my fonts already look pretty good and I don't do that. Instead I used @dugan's awesome blog post about font configuration on Slackware and made some tweaks, including using a self compiled freetype, with the patch applied to enable subpixel rendering in FreeType. I changed a few other things as well IIRC, though I did not keep my own notes as I figured I would just go back to dugan's page if I needed to setup another machine.

Well you can use tabs without a tab bar. Enable the tab cycler and you will see them on Ctrl-Tab. Or search though open tabs with Quick Commands or by opening the window panel.

Yeah but I don't think that is what he means. He means, how do websites gathering statics count Vivaldi. Do they count it as Vivaldi or as Chrome (and clones)? That is why he later said this:

Lysander666 also misunderstood him but has the right idea.

Indeed, the answer depends entirely on the website capturing statistics and how much effort the take to parse the User Agent. In addition we lie about our user Agent to a bunch of sites, e.g. we claim to be Chrome to most Google sites. If we did not they give us a different (crapper or non-working) version of their page or tell us we are unsupported. We also lie to whatsapp, netflix and even facebook (for Vivaldi on macOS only) for similar reasons. There are mroe sites but I can't be bothered to look them all up. ;)

+1 to that!

While there are a few things we have tweaked that may be causing a difference in speed for the most part there is not a lot in it. We have not worked heavily in this area. So to be 100% honest and transparent if it feels faster it is likely either perception or because you profile is cleaner and a lacks things like extensions that sometimes slow things down.

That all said, even though I would not expect a big raw speed increase from Vivaldi over Chrome right now, I do believe that our range of options particularly in the case of tab management could allow for workflows that are faster and more efficient in navigating the internet. In addition as others have noticed we disable (or give the option to disable) the various calls home that Chrome (and even Chromium make), so it is worth considering us for those reasons alone.

P.S. As for the ‘mildly buggy’, whatever that is a reference to, feel free to log it https://vivaldi.com/bugreport/ as this increases the changes we will fix it, benefiting all users.

32-bit Linux support is getting increasingly hard because upstream Chromium/Google do not really care about it. For instance in the latest internal versions we do not have AV1 working for 32-bit Linux. So at some point I am expecting it will become too much effort for us (as we are still a very small team and have lots of other things we are working on) but we will do our best to delay that day as long as possible.

I think that sync is either enabled or you have copied over your home directory or parts of it that include our preferences because we do not do that. :D

It should be automatic now both from SBo or my latest-vivaldi script. :D

[EDIT]: Ah… you saw this. I was too slow!

ruario, thank you so much for taking the time to reply to the posts in this thread in detail. It's fantastic that you've put a few moments aside to go through everything and address some important points. Outstanding work which is a model of what makes this community so special.

I think this is very honest, I was wondering the same thing. I think perception does come into it, but there's no doubting how much faster Vivaldi is than every other browser on my netbook [even Falkon]. Talking of which...

Which is greatly appreciated. When that day comes I think I will just hold onto it for as long as I reasonably can. I am still using Chromium 68 on my desktop as a backup browser, even though AlienBob's latest build is 71.

Is sync automatically enabled on a new install? That would explain it. Nothing was copied over though, unless Vivaldi 'inherited' something from my Chromium install. Either way, I'm not complaining, it made things easier.

We can't automatically enable sync if we don't know your user name and password. :D

You can import things like bookmarks from Chrome but it is not automatic and it does not include extensions or theme options, so something else is going on here.

Correct. So, it must be difficult to know how many people are using Vivaldi?