An explanation for my new profile picture (And much shilling for Vivaldi)

#1

I’ve been… frustrated, with Firefox’s recent changes. I was never told to update my browser when I closed it, then one day, ESR56 ESR52 became ESR60, then I smashed the browser, then and there. I was finished.

Part of my frustration is because I wanted to keep some functionality which was no longer possible in Firefox beyond version 56. In my mind, it was the last good version of Firefox there was, despite how slow and laggy it tended to be on my machine. Then in the Ubuntu Linux discord server, I was asking about tiled tabbing in Chrome, and I was told about Vivaldi.

I instantly fell in love. Had I not caught wind of it from a Hungarian friend I use to play Re-Volt 1.2 with (Now available as Re-Volt OpenGL, otherwise better known as RVGL and available for Linux systems) I never would had cared about it. Next thing I know, I was tab stacking and tab tiling with a great big smile on my face because its tab management features are nothing lees than stellar.

Web panels with the option to show pages as their mobile counterparts for potentially better display in the sidebar is also pretty nice for cursory glances at social feeds, E-Mail and chat services. I discovered Stylus has real-time preview of changes, which was a big reason I was using older versions of Stylish, everything just became easy and I loved every moment of it.

I still do, but the caveats of having to use third-party sync services for bookmarks and passwords (but no history syncing, sadly) can be a tad frustrating, which is why I hope a mobile version of their web browser comes out soon, because I would love to completely jump ship from Firefox for a Chrome-alike I enjoy using, with most of the functional bells and whistles I ever had, or never could have in Firefox.

As for the name of the browser, I actually kind of hate it. But knowing it’s a Chrome-alike developed by people who previously worked on Opera, it’s understandable where the name came from. Speaking of names, I’ll maintain this identity as a nod to my Internet-using lineage but that’s about it.

Check it out.

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#2

I have not tested Vivaldi yet. There is no ESR56, but ESR52 exists.

Personally I’ll continue to use Firefox ESR 52.
It supports legacy addons, such as SiteDelta, TableTools2, Show Parent Folder, Manage Folders, Wired Marker.

If someone want to continue to use ESR 52 (but without security updates - at own risk) - look at this answer on AskUbuntu. We need to install packages from JonathanF PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/firefox-esr-52
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-esr

If we talking about legacy addons then other possible solutions would be SeaMonkey and/or Waterfox.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

Firefox 66.0.3 disabled my Zotero extension - now using Brave browser instead
#3

Seems like you are correct. But actually give Vivaldi a try before dismissing it, I know it’s easy to stick with what you know but you might find it worthwhile to use if you’re really into the idea of viewing or transferring information between multiple webpages at once.

If you back up your profile with a tool like FEBE, or just make a duplicate of your present profile before upgrading to present Firefox to see what replacement extensions Mozilla recommends you could use then possibly find a duplicate or similar of for Chrome, to use in Vivaldi that would help too.

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#4

What I never understand is why devs on projects such as Firefox keep changing the damned thing even when a majority of users clearly indicate they do not want the change, or, at the very least, don’t indicate they do want it.

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#5

Change for the sake of change I guess. On Windows, Firefox first became more like Chrome in design, then it became more like Edge, vaguely. I’m peeved myself Firefox no longer has its own identity, but I suppose Mozilla think it’s better to go with what’s current than with what works. They see WebExtensions as the future as it’s easy in the future to develop for it (while leaving a lot of their past behind) and with Google’s Chromium and Electron platforms dominating much of the Internet landscape, they didn’t see a future in Gecko, so being like Chrome is the future they went with.

I think it’s going to damn them in the long run, then we’ll be seeing sad stories about Firefox becoming inactive and decommissioned. Hopefully before AMO closes shop there’s an archive and ideas taken from it for use with future Chrome and Chromium iterations.

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#6

But Vivaldi was just about the best composer that every lived, in my opinion… :slight_smile:

#7

I’ve always been a Firefox user until recently I gave it up for Chrome and Brave( I mostly use Brave now). There are some issues that I can’t just seem to solve or go around…

There’s the tearing issue and font-rendering issue; there’s a workaround to the tearing, but that causes the whole browser to constantly crash and freeze…:expressionless:

I’ve never been sadder with any other software in my life such as this when I gave Firefox up :disappointed:. Still now I think about giving it a go again to see if anything’s changed…

#8

It’s pretentious. But everything about the browser makes up for it.

@Apollonius as you are using a Chrome-alike at the moment, does Brave have the capability to make “Stacks” of tabs, where each tab in the tab bar can represent a series of pages in the same space? Because that’s one of the features I’ve grown accustomed to.

I never mentioned this in my original post, but seeing two design concepts I attempted to implement in Firefox seamlessly combined in a Chrome-alike blew my heckin’ mind. I use to be all over tile tabs and group tab bar, now in Vivaldi this idea of a “Group bar” is fully realized in an elegant way where each tab can then become its own group, and tile tabs is almost realized fully in the present snapshot, however I am still waiting on them to iron out tile separators.

#9

Unfortunately, no, Brave doesn’t have that type of feature…:confused:
But according to their GitHub, their’s been a feature request of this sort, you can have a look here.:slight_smile:

#10

They could always fold into Vivaldi team and fork their browser afterward.

I think we might see a lot of this as chrome-alikes develop novel features. It would smack of irony if Firefox somehow folds itself into another team with a more fully-featured browser.

#11

Meh, it’s just a slow shell around Chromium. I’ve been using Pale Moon since the first beta of version 28 and no issues so far, quite the opposite.

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#12

Exactly my feelings toward desktop environments.

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