Opera x Vivaldi

[travelingstampede]

travelingstampede last edited by

Hello, I am new here and just found this forum. I have been testing out multiple web browsers, and I really like Vivaldi, and Otter, but I never actually tried Opera itself. I seem to have missed it before it switched over to the Blink engine. How does it compare to Vivaldi?

I like FOSS, but I can live with Vivaldi being partially open-source (I think it's only the UI that is proprietary.) Despite this, I'm quite impressed with Vivaldi's performance, and it makes me want to go give Opera a try. What are the differences between it and Vivaldi?

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

Opera is generally faster but has fewer options. Also, Opera has a built-in ad blocker and VPN.

Both browsers are based on Blink so in principle should render any particular website the same - and so should Chromium. Other than ads of course. Opera's ad blocker is at a lower level than an extension would be, so on ad-heavy sites Opera will be faster. Also the interface is simpler and therefore requires less processing power. (Recently I've been disappointed with how slowly Vivaldi opens a new window, for example.)

On the other hand, if you want an old style menu bar, tab stacks or the ability to tile tabs (to display several pages side by side in the same window), Opera won't do any of that. Want to change colors of the interface? Vivaldi can, but not Opera. Vivaldi has more options in its Settings page - kind of a mixed blessing there.

I have both, I use Opera more. And not because I'm a moderator here (they asked me if I wanted to be one there but I said I didn't think I could do both). Opera does what I need it to do, it's that simple.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

One thing that drove me away from Vivaldi after one day of using it, I couldn't create separate profiles for stable and their snapshot release, even though it's part of Mac OS's fault, for it be so hard to run multiple instances of the same program at once. Even though Opera is based on Chromium, it just feels like it's the original browser, compared to Vivaldi, which feels like it tries to hard to feel like Opera IMO.

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

Perhaps that's a built-in issue unique to a Mac. On both Win7 and Win10 systems, I routinely run both a stable and multiple snapshot Vivaldi versions, but I make sure to install only one of them as a normal install (the stable one). The rest are installed as independent, stand-alone versions into different install sub-directories and can be run simultaneously with each other as well as with the normal stable install.