I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...), and later again for an official blog post (see https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...). It was indeed much better than many of the other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any, requests to Google.

On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched a new window to find an immediate call to vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of information, including what appears to be a distinct 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key: pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to take a closer look into the traffic to determine how sticky these are to the user, device, or browser instance.

Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the top of the list of browsers though. For example, they don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly observed in browsers today.