Goodbye, Vivaldi

I did not think that I would say this, but I think it is time to say goodbye to Vivaldi. For those who do not know what Vivaldi is, it is a web browser based on privacy and user power, and do please check it out as it is a great browser for anyone, but, as I will discuss, it is not for me.

I started using Vivaldi around two years ago, but after some time, I switched Vivaldi to Firefox. After using Firefox for a really long time, I decided to switch back to Vivaldi because apparently they solved most of the issues I had with Vivaldi back when I first switched from it, and they also had a mail client built into the browser. "I mean, how cool is that?" was my first impression of it, and for a couple of months, 5.5 months to be exact, I was very pleased with it, and I used the mail client so much that even with the performance issues that I faced with Vivaldi, I did not care about them and continued to use Vivaldi for the mail client. As you can see, the mail client was such a big productivity boost for my workflow, as I did not need to open tabs for different mail accounts and mail providers, or I did not need another application running in the background only for mail; I could just use my browser for all of that, and more.

After all of that, however, the mail client started to lag out, and when I tried to open it, it only then opened after 10 seconds of waiting while the whole application froze, and when I tried to close the client, it would again lag out, and I could not do anything; I mean, it was at a point that I started using Gmail's own mail website instead of the built-in mail client. Moreover, when I tried to open a link from an email I got, I still had to wait so much time before I was even able to look through the link, and when I needed to go back to the mail, I still had to wait for an annoyingly long time.

So, I decided to go back to Firefox, and I could not have been more happy with my decision. I cannot believe that it is this fast and tactile. There is that much of a difference that I started to notice small things happening so much quicker on Firefox instead of on Vivaldi, which I was so used to. I was also able to get the customization I got on Vivaldi with Firefox's custom user CSS. I now use Cascade customization on Firefox, and I really enjoy it. As for my main reason for not switching to Firefox for a really long time, the built-in mail client of Vivaldi, I now use Apple's own mail application. I mean, it is cumbersome, but it gets the job done, and I can say that it is much faster than Vivaldi's own mail client.

In conclusion, get what you will with this story. Use Vivaldi or Firefox. Both of them are great browsers, but they are for different people. I personally like Firefox better, but Vivaldi's team's work is actually great for the future of browsing, so please do check them out and help them out.

As for the future of this blog, I am considering replacing my main website, mkutay.dev, with this blog, as I really do not have any use for the main site, so when I change it, do not forget to update your bookmarks.

Made and written by Mehmet Kutay Bozkurt. All rights reserved.