Because of regular errors with Vivaldi, which they blame on my antivirus, I’ve been testing alternatives for Windows 11.
The errors include this message, rendering the program useless.
Vivaldi’s people would have you believe that an antivirus program is deleting things out of the folder, but that doesn’t explain why, after many attempts, the browser loads again. There’s no logic to that, because if an antivirus program were doing that, it wouldn’t be putting the file back—and if something else did, the antivirus program would delete it again. So zero points for their logic, even though they get 10 out of 10 for trying to be helpful.
Indeed, on investigating it further, Vivaldi could be lying. The error message refers to missing files, but the files are indeed there.
There is sometimes an error saying a Vivaldi DLL is missing, too, but, it’s also there:
Now, it could be Microsoft Windows, which is far more likely, given its history of strange behaviours and untested programming.
In any case, it was sad to see a favourite starting to falter, whatever the cause.
I recently trialled and deleted LibreWolf—not really that different from Firefox, from which it spawned.
The Firefox-based Midori failed at the first hurdle, where the ‘Import Data’ button for getting old bookmarks and passwords did nothing. Not ready for prime time.
I was surprised to see how far Pale Moon had wandered from Firefox, but sadly its type rendering—a criterion for me, but I imagine not everyone—was not up to snuff. Here’s how one paragraph in Lucire’s web edition looks:
And here’s how it looks in Vivaldi:
My judgement is based on knowing what the typeface looks like in print. I know some people might simply judge it on how it looks on the screen only.
I wanted to like Pale Moon because I appreciate the work its developer has done, and overall its UI is practical, but it’s not for me.
I was recommended Zen by a user with a private account (hence not naming them, though I would love to give them credit), who uses it as their daily driver. This is a very good, very stable reimagining of its Firefox base, and it’s now my go-to when Vivaldi plays silly buggers.
It does suffer from Firefox’s type rendering. I thought it differed at first, just because the UI is so well resolved, but on closer inspection it is identical. This is totally subjective, but I simply prefer the Chromium result.
For instance, here is a comparison of some type:
Vivaldi
Zen
At small sizes, the letterspacing is inferior, while for this blog, Ilisarniq displays too loosely and not as proportionally correct (my opinion looking at samples on the official website), though our in-house Plantin looks good on both browsers. Overall, it’s a commendable second place.
The vertical tabs to the left take some getting used to, and I have far more open than Zen can handle without scrolling.
But I do like the bookmarks’ toolbar, closer to what I had in the 2010s with Firefox, making them far more accessible than with Vivaldi. I’ve also put back various tools to ape the Vivaldi experience, such as restoring Easy Screenshot and some other plug-ins I once used before I made the switch to Chromium-based c. 2016 after Firefox started chewing through my RAM.
No such trouble now, and it’s great to have something non-Chromium back in (hopefully) regular use.
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