The source is incomplete, you cannot build the browser from it, it's just there for licence compliance.

Anyhow, it's just chrome with extra stuff you can disable (email client? rss reader?) and extra stuff I cannot imagine living without (side panels).

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/panels/web-panels/

I do not understand why no other browser has the ability to keep a predefined list of pages always open to the side, especially for real-time communication.

A lot of features Vivaldi has are definitely "nice-to-have" level, especially stuff they seemingly put in for fun like Philips Hue integration.

But there are some very functional settings I use that I just miss in every other browser. Most notable for me are:

- extremely (at least relative to Chrome or Firefox) configurable keyboard shortcuts

- easily editable search engines (you have to enable this with an about:config parameter that isn't default -- not that it's turned off by default, but that it's a parameter you have to know about beforehand and add yourself to the list)

And it's Chromium, so you get Chromium extensions such as uBlock Origin, which is why I stuck with it over qutebrowser (which also has configurable keyboard shortcuts) even though it's closed source.

I loved Vivaldi. It has the spirit of Opera, where it's all about giving power users options instead of streamlining them away for UX (which is still an option you can have with Vivaldi!). I use Firefox now -- Manifest v3 was the last straw -- but I lament the loss of configurability in some areas.

If you pin tabs, they'll be loaded on start and stay until you close them. Always in sight even if you have a lot of tabs. At least on Firefox.

It seems like this would almost perfectly act as a "predefined list of pages always open to the side, especially for real-time communication" or did I miss something? It won't be next to the page, but always visible at the top-left and kept between restarts.

I know pinned tabs, I pin the music tab, it plays in the background, I never have to look at it, cool.

The point of having slack/mattermost/discord/whatever always on the side is that one does not have to switch away from the main tab just to see what's going on.

I use Vivaldi as my secondary browser and I like it. I use it because my workplace mandates Google Workspaces. I use it solely for work purposes for 2 main reasons:

1. It has tree tabs and I can't find any other Chrome based browser with Tree tabs

2. Google Meet is 2nd class citizen on Firefox and lacks many features.

What do you find to be missing for Google Meet? Firefox is also my daily driver, and my workplace is heavily into the whole Google ecosystem. Meet seems to be fine enough, but maybe I'm not looking for things that aren't shown to me.

Google meet on FF doesn’t support the video effects like screen blur or advanced filters. At least that was the message I got the last time I tried it.

Ah, OK. Haven't tried that, mostly camera-off for work.

As I understand it, Vivaldi is Chromium, with a custom chrome UI rendered as a React app run similarly to an extension, but more privileged.

The source they publish there are the changes they made to allow the "extension, but more privileged" clause above.

The React app is closed source.