This is basically the old Opera approach. Vivaldi was created by the Opera founders, is made up of ex-Opera staff, and has the goal of recreating an Opera 12-esque browser experience on top of the Chromium engine. If you liked Opera 12, you'll like their "bloated / OS-replacement" (also highly customisable, almost everything is removable) UI approach. If you didn't like Opera 12, you likely won't.
If you haven't tried the latest snapshots you're in for a treat: the UI now bundles a full calendar and mail client :D
I use Firefox as my daily driver today, but I was an Opera 12 user: the UI was bloated-by-default out of the box but the two important caveats were: (1) 100% customisability allowing you to streamline it easily, and (2) bloat never impacted performance at all (in fact Opera was the most performant browser back then for heavy tab use, even while the integrated mail client was indexing hundreds of incoming mails). I can see perf. being a bigger challenge for Vivaldi though since they have less control over the Chromium foundations... Curious to see how they get on with this.
> I've found nothing about how their sync protocol works
As far as I've seen they haven't released the source of their sync server[0] or protocol, but the mechanism seems similar enough to Chrome that they've likely stuck to using a similar protocol, just with their own server endpoint(s). It prompts me to use macOS keychain for sync encryption, as Chrome does, so this seems to strongly imply e2e.
The internals UI[1] also gives some nice data for the curious. It shows e2e as being enabled for me, but it looks like it isn't always (possibly only newer versions of Vivaldi support e2e and they need some kind of backward compat.)
[0] https://bifrost.vivaldi.com/
[1] vivaldi://sync-internals
I'll give it another chance one of these days, though. I'm hearing a lot of news about it lately so I suppose there will be improvements and maybe the newer versions are closer to what I want.
I'm still on Firefox for a few reasons but I've been checking it out as it evolves, and been pleasantly surprised with progress over time.
There's a few things that I think are inherent to Chromium, that I doubt they'll ever get back; one of these is definitely MDI. But on the other hand, there's also a few things that I believed were Presto-specific (HTML renderer-related, e.g. text-selection of link text) that they have somehow managed to re-implement on top of Chromium, so never say never.
> Unfortunately, Vivaldi wasn't recreating that when I tried it.
Yeah, Vivaldi is not snappy. But... given the state of browser UI performance today (massively regressed from 8 years ago), it compares favourably to competitors. Which isn't to be sniffed at considering they've added so many things on top of the beast that is Chromium.
Despite the apparent bloat of the default experience, what it really does is just increases discoverability of the UI for new users. While things like gestures, keymaps, etc. still allow people to run a very slimmed down browser if desired.
"it's never quite the same as the first time you fall in love"
> bloated interface
It looks almost exactly like Chrome to me. I have them side by side and the difference is barely noticeable.
> word processor
I assume you mean its note feature, which I know exists but has never once been used by me nor has it ever gotten in my way.
> minigames
If there are minigames I had no idea they existed. I'm fairly certain Chrome has some though.
> All things work, but none of them work good.
This isn't clear enough to be worth arguing against, but the only thing I'll point out that doesn't "work good" for me is the tab switching interface is sometimes slow and gets "caught" on the tab switching screen. Everything else is business as usual.
> absolutely no tracking protection by default
I'm not sure if they have ever claimed this, nor do I recall if it is enabled by default, but Vivaldi has a built in ad blocker, and you can still install Chrome extensions for additional protection.
> I've found nothing about how their sync protocol works
A quick search for "Vivaldi sync" turned up this: "You also need to pick an encryption password that is used for encrypting your data. Your encryption password is used locally on your computer for encrypting the data you’re about to send to our servers and to decrypt the received data. Your encryption password is never sent to us or any other third party, which ensures that we cannot decrypt your data." [0] (Also linked from the article you're commenting on.)
Maybe that isn't the technical detail you're looking for but it's not "nothing."
It was promised from its first technical preview that it would eventually have a built in mail client.
It isn't "bloat" any more than a screwdriver on a Swiss army knife is bloat. It's one of the key features of the browser going forward. If you believe browsers should not have built in mail clients, well, that's why alternatives exist. It's Vim vs the IDE debate, at some point you just have to accept that some people want the bare bones editor and some people want the full featured experience and there's nothing wrong with either approach.
Opera used to have notes and I doubt they ever had a CVE due to it.
I'm not fully sold on "doesn't belong in browser" - arguably, it the browser is almost like an OS, it is not far fetched to ask for such features. I guess that is also what ChromeOS does.
One means 'too many features' (without impact on performance of other features). Maybe it makes things harder to figure out (though not necessarily). But it doesn't impact speed of execution, away from the bloat.
The other is like a fat bloated human who just got finished eating way too much. Their belly distended, they find it hard to run or lift something heavy. They are slowed down.
Vivaldi seems bloated in the first way, sure. It's like, a "wall of features". But it doesn't seem to me to be slow as a result. It seems faster than Chrome, Safari, or Firefox on my (macOS) main computer.
True, I don't need most of the features. (But I love a few of them, such as the OmniWeb-style thumbnail tabs.)
But I am not disadvantaged by them at all.
I generally have 5-6 browsers open, and Vivaldi recently is usually among them. If it had in-built tracking protection (like Safari), or no-effort ad blocking (like Brave), it would probably be one of my "main" browsers.
The vast number of settings and features is great, but that's meaningless if the everyday browsing feels like using a bloated website on a Raspberry Pi.
Now of course the devs can do what they want, but if they aim to compete with other browsers they have astounding priorities.
I was using Vivaldi back then, it used to freeze whole browser once or twice a week, which was unacepptable when I was doing ie. demo of new version. Such freeze took few minutes to recover from, and the whole call was 30 min of length.
After switching back to Safari problem was gone.
So for me Vivaldi is big NO.
Also, absolutely no tracking protection by default, I've found nothing about how their sync protocol works (is it e2ee?), so I take their argument of "vivaldy is better for your privacy than Chrome" with a grain of salt.