On trying the Vivaldi browser and on Safari 26’ bookmarks-UI

I’ve been using Safari for 99% of the time since I installed it on my Windows XP machine in 2007, before buying a Mac. However, since Safari’s version 26 redesign, which makes it hard to find and use bookmarks in the sidebar, because folders are no longer expand when clicking the chevron, but work like menu-items on iOS, I had enough motivation to try alternative browsers. I decided to try Vivaldi, it seemed like a well built alternative made not in the US. And for a while, I was very happy.

Vivaldi’s tab-organisation features were great, it encrypted my preferences to sync them across devices, its UI on desktop felt like a professional application and didn’t use Liquid Glass, and the bookmarks view in the sidebar was useful—on top of all of that, the iOS version was pretty good too! So why was I only happy for a while? Vivaldi showed two issues that got in the way of everyday use, almost constantly.

Issue One: It lost open tabs

It's probably a bad habit of mine, but I like organising the sites I use for a while in tab-groups, instead of bookmarking them. I only bookmark sites I need regularly, but not all the time. Why bookmark a site I will only be looking at for one project and then never again? Anyways, Vivaldi’s organisation features for tabs were very useful to me. It allowed me to sort tabs into stacks and workspaces. Workspaces in Vivaldi are what tab groups are in Safari and stacks allowed me to group several tabs within the current workspace (YouTube video, time-code 00:57).

The issue is: From time to time, Vivaldi would lose all my open tabs in all workspaces. The workspaces themselves remained, but the number of open tabs in all of them would drop to zero. This happened several times over the course of a few weeks, and I couldn’t figure out why or how to avoid it. Once, I managed to recover the tabs using the “Recently Closed”-feature, the other times the closing must have happened too long ago to recover them, before I noticed they had gone.

It seemed to happen more often after clicking on a link in a third party app, like Apple Mail or Ivory. After it happened a few times, I noticed myself avoiding clicking on links and I began copy-pasting URLs to Vivaldi instead. I also avoided quitting Vivaldi, and rather minimised it to the Dock, even when I knew I wouldn’t need it for a while. It got to a point where I refrained from shutting down my Mac or rebooting it. I even delayed a security update to avoid quitting Vivaldi, because I hadn’t yet saved all open tabs to bookmarks. That was the point when I decided I should stop using Vivaldi.

Issue Two: Minimising to the Dock caused problems

Since I didn’t quit Vivaldi due to issue one, I often minimised it to the Dock. After fetching a Vivaldi window from the Dock, however, it behaved oddly. The address-bar wouldn’t properly focus and airdropping links to my Mac would result in a “successful” airdrop, according to my phone, but Vivaldi would simply not open the page—not in a new window or tab.

In conclusion

I wanted an alternative to Safari out of frustration with Apple’s recent design choices. I selected Vivaldi because I try to avoid US products at the moment. I switched back, because despite the deteriorating quality of Apple’s UIs, their products still seem to work best for me. I dread the day I have to upgrade my Mac to an OS using Liquid Glass though, and I am flirting with the idea of getting a Steam Machine, despite it being a US product, but more on that another time.

Afterthought—I also disliked that Vivaldi uses the Chrome engine, but I understand that building a rendering engine for the web is extremely hard.