And this is how I switched back from Vivaldi to Firefox

When Vivaldi came out a bit more than a year ago, I was rather enthusiastic about it, even though I remembered what the same people did to Opera and even though it was yet another Blink-based browser aka Google slave. I was always happy to add new browsers to my panel, in order to run multiple sessions simultaneously, and after all it was nice to have a fast browser for a change (Firefox/Cyberfox were still quite slow for me as I was on Win 7: they seem to perform a lot better on Win 10).

However, things eventually changed. First, Cyberfox was discontinued, and on this occasion I found out that it’s possible (and trivial) to run multiple independent sessions simultaneously with just Firefox. That was quite the revelation, and I promptly dropped Cyberfox and also Pale Moon, which was getting a bit outdated and was now failing to run Flash (having a contained Flash environment was basically the only reason I kept it around). After that, I was basically 60% Firefox, 40% Vivaldi.

Second, Vivaldi was regularly updated and improved. However, version 1.9 was a disaster: it completely broke the autocompletion in the address bar (it already used to be inferior to the autocompletion in Firefox, it became even worse, only providing one unique suggestion and only if you typed the exact beginning of the URL – worthless). I’ve also always been very unhappy with the SOCKS proxy support in Vivaldi, which is the same as Chrome = use the system-defined (same as Internet Explorer) proxy settings. I use one SOCKS proxy per separate session, so a browser not able to live its own life, distinct from the system settings, was a drag. Last but not least, I’ve always been annoyed by how Vivaldi doesn’t remember where to save/pick files on a per-site basis like Firefox seems to do pretty well.

At this point, I had only 2 reasons to keep using Vivaldi: Speed Dial, for which Firefox doesn’t seem to provide a suitable equivalent (no I don’t want to install an add-on just for that), and the fact that I couldn’t be bothered to migrate my session manually.

That was, until disaster stroke. I sent a tab to a new window, forgot all about it, and when I closed the browser I closed the primary window first. In case that shit never happened to you, what happens then is that when you restart your browser, the last closed window is restored (so, the one with just a tab, instead of my primary window that had 20-ish tabs). In Firefox, the History menu allows you to restore your 2 latest closed windows, meaning that in case you fuck up like that, you can easily recover (it happened to me a bunch of times). In Vivaldi, you’re fucked.
So, bye bye Vivaldi, I’ll just keep you around for testing when doing web development…