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.