Well, I tried. I used Vivaldi as my main web browser for a month, and while there’s a lot to like, I found I had to change the way I work to get around its limitations and problems.

The biggest problem is Vivaldi’s inconsistent and confusing handling of links, bookmarks, and tabs. The Vivaldi developers have apparently failed to grasp that links should behave differently, depending on their context.

The bookmark editor is extraordinarily clunky, which is surprising, given that it should be a simple feature to code.

A lot of basic functionality that I take for granted in Firefox and other browsers is still missing from Vivaldi. Dragging and dropping bookmarks (eg. from the address bar to the bookmark sidebar) doesn’t work. Hovering the mouse over a bookmark doesn’t show the full URL. There’s no way to edit bookmarks directly in the bookmark toolbar. The right-click context menu for images doesn’t include a ‘Properties’ option. And so on.

Vivaldi’s developers seem to be aware of these issues, and have been working on them in developer ‘snapshot’ versions of the browser. I started using the snapshot versions in the hope that I’d get some relief from the problems I mentioned, but instead ran into even more problems.

Meanwhile, I’ve switched back to Firefox. I’m still optimistic about Vivaldi, but for now I’m only using it experimentally.