I’ve been a little annoyed at Firefox lately due to the addition of AI assistant features that I don’t really care for, in particular today when it seemed like the AI link summarization feature got enabled again despite the fact that I swear I had turned it off multiple times before.
Anyway, so Vivaldi put out a statement today that I thought was pretty nice:
In particular:
But right now, there is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile. We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.
Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.
We will stay true to our identity, giving users control and enabling people to use the browser in combination with whatever tools they want to use. Our focus is on building a powerful personal and private browser for you to explore the web on your own terms. We will not turn exploration into passive consumption.
I had tried Vivaldi in the past and it didn’t really stick, but I like what they’re saying and I’m down to try it again. I’ve taken some time to customize Vivaldi, and wow! It sure has a lot of features and customization options.
Does anyone else who uses Vivaldi want to share how they’ve it set up? One of the things I need to figure out is if I can migrate the search keys feature over to Vivaldi, since I quite liked using that in Firefox…
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If you’re privacy/anti-telemetry focused, there’s librewolf. It’s a firefox fork with all that crap ripped out. Takes a bit of getting used to but I’ve been liking it so far.
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Yeah, I’ve seen LibreWolf suggested to me a few times. I like the vibe of it, but I felt I should give Vivaldi a fair shake first since I know that it’s quite different from other browsers I’ve used.
While I’m here, I could share a bit of how it has been so far. In general, Vivaldi is quite customizable, which I like. You can see how I have mine set up here:
The tab bar isn’t shown at all. Instead, I use the “Windows and Tabs” sidebar, along with some pretty simple sidebar options: Bookmarks, Downloads, History, Translate, Reading List, Feed Reader. The top bar is also pretty simple, with a back and forward button, refresh button, search bar, ProtonPass, uBlock Origin Lite, and ProtonVPN.
Other thoughts:
- I like the built-in feed reader. However, it leaves a quite a bit to be desired because it’s presented through the email UI. It’s been making me want to get back into having an actual feed reader though; I miss the days of the Google feed reader that I used to use many years ago. I know there’s a bunch of OSS options now for this, but I haven’t gotten around to self-hosting any of it.
- Being able to group and sort the tabs in the sidebar is pretty nice. I’ve got two tab workspaces, one for personal stuff like email and another for Twitch. It’s also nice that you can see right away which tabs are synced, which ones were closed recently, and which ones haven’t been opened yet. However, I’m the kind of person who typically has less than 10 tabs at any moment, so it feels like overkill. Pinned tabs are enough for me, I think.
- However, for some reason, the styling that shows you which tab you are currently viewing is the same as the styling that shows you which tabs you have selected for manual sorting. This results in some seemingly buggy behavior sometimes, where the tab you are looking at is not the same as the currently selected tab in the sidebar.
- You can’t mute/unmute tabs from the sidebar directly (you have to use the context menu), which is a little annoying. The browser has some nice automatic controls for this kind of thing based on which window you have open, but these were not built to handle the ways I typically browse the web (that is to say, I’m often listening to a Twitch stream even when it’s not visible).
- I’ve heard about adblock support not being as good on Vivaldi, since it’s based on Chrome’s new Manifest V3 specification, which breaks some important adblock features. I have noticed that in general, Vivaldi feels noticeably slower than Firefox, though I haven’t timed this to make sure that’s not just me imagining things. You can still install uBlock, but it’s a more limited version of what’s available on Firefox.
- Vivaldi has notes, a reading list, translation, and more built-in to the sidebar. You can even load any page you want as a sidebar. However, I end up not using most of this anyways, since I prefer to use Obsidian to take notes.
- Vivaldi comes with a ProtonVPN plugin installed by default, which I have not considered doing at all for some reason. It’s nice to have the VPN right in the browser, so I can protect my web browsing even when I’m not on VPN because I want to stream to Twitch.
- You can tile tabs directly in the browser into one window view, which is really cool because this tiling is remembered if you tab away and come back. However, I found myself not really utilizing this feature very much. When I need to use tiling, I don’t need multiple windows to be grouped together and I can use the tiling from the window manager on my computer instead.
I think I’ll use it for a few more days, but I’m leaning towards using LibreWolf next. A lot of the Vivaldi features are nice, but they’re not game-changing enough for me. If there’s one thing I would like to keep, it’s to have the tabs on a sidebar that I can hide so I can have more vertical space. I quite like it and it’s growing on me more.
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Would it actually do anything for your privacy? Logins don’t typically consider IP address these days (if you meant not getting doxxed by your online accounts), and the only thing SSL/TLS doesn’t encrypt is what server you’re talking to (if you meant govt/ISP not spying on your communications).
Ah librewolf doesn’t have many of those features baked in.
Doesn’t have:
- No native RSS reader, notes or reading list.
- There’s no built-in VPN either but you can add one.
- There’s no tab tiling either from what I can see.
Does have:
- It does have tab groups but I find myself using tridactyl for navigation cuz vimhead.
- ublock is built-in.
- There is a vertical tab bar and I have mine set up that way:
Alternatively, you can hide them entirely.
some caveats
- Cookies, history, site data are cleared by default. You can add certain sites to an allowlist to preserve them before you open them and sign in. This tripped me up a lot at first.
- any commands that just use the
alt modifier only won’t work as firefox makes it summon the app menu when a certain privacy feature is turned on. Therefore librewolf does as well.
- Because it uses canvas blocking for privacy, some image uploads to sites like bluesky and others will error unless you disable it beforehand.
- Because of the privacy, there’s location and timezone spoofing. So if you like looking at what time a twitch message was sent or want to generate a timestamp for Discord or something, you’ll need another browser for accuracy
- DRM disabled by default but easily re-enable..able
- There are others I can’t think of atm but they are quite minor for me.
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Yeah, I ended up switching over to LibreWolf today. As it so happens, most of the “caveats” you listed are actually things I like! LibreWolf’s resist fingerprinting feature and clearing of cooking and site data also seems to work better than Firefox’s container tabs, of which I had stopped using because it was too annoying to use.
Thanks for the brief on LibreWolf though, that’s been really helpful to figure out how to tweak LibreWolf’s setup to my liking. 
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No problem! happy to help!
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I’ve learned a few more things about LibreWolf and Flatpak that wasn’t obvious at first. These are really Flatpak things, but in case it helps others:
- If the browser prompts you for a security key (like a YubiKey), it won’t be able to detect it. You can fix this by changing the Flatpak permissions to allow access to all devices.
- If you use Tailscale and try accessing a server in your tailnet, the request will 404. You can fix this by changing the Flatpak permissions to allow access to system files.
The 404 issue really confused me for a while, it made me think that my homelab setup was broken…
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Maybe you or anyone else here has come across this. One of the things I was missing on LibreWolf was a way to easily sync your browser config across different devices. What alternative is there on LibreWolf? If there isn’t, what do you do to sync your browser configuration?
You can still use Mozilla’s Firefox Sync with LibreWolf. There’s also some work being done to make Firefox Sync easier to self-host.
See: LibreWolf FAQ - Can I use Firefox Sync with LibreWolf? Is it safe to do so?
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(⊙o⊙) I have no clue how I didn’t come across this. Thank you!!! I’ve become pretty tied to the Firefox ecosystem because of some custom scripting so that’s why LibreWolf was my main contender.
oh I haven’t tried this yet
When I get my former daily on linux that will probably be the time
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