The Browser Wars

[bloodwrites]

I've been a hardcore Firefox devotee for years, but the recent update shaved valuable pixels off my limited screen real estate, so I went looking for an alternative.

Vivaldi was really the only option, because I wouldn't touch Chrome with a ten foot pole (yes I'm aware Vivaldi is chrome-based shut up), Opera is so 2000's, and Brave is some kind of block chain fuckery or some shit IDEK.

Sorry, did you say 'Edge'? Fuck no.

Anyway. Vivaldi. I imported all my bookmarks and passwords (yes I use Firefox as my password manager, they kinda got grandfathered in because they used to have an actual password manager then integrated it into the browser and it's not ideal but it mostly worked for me), and started having a play.

Sync is great (I gotta have sync, Firefox was barely adequate in that regard), the built-in notes app is fantastic, the web panels are WONDERFUL, the reading list...

I could go on for hours, honestly. It's got a ton of nifty features and I was almost sold. Then I opened my website.

There were horrible grey scrollbars in the middle of my page. So apparently chrome based browsers still need webkit to make scrollbars pretty. Okay, well, serves me right for not concerning myself with browser compatibility. Sorted that out.

But while I was staring at scrollbars, I realised some of my images looked like shit.

Yeah, images (particularly small and pixel images) look like complete arse in Vivaldi and no amount of settings or css seems to be able to fix it.

So there's that. I've also got a wee issue in that the development tools (as far as I could tell with my short poke while trying to figure out what was going on with the images) are not working for me. I do most of my CSS in Firefox and it Just Works. I couldn't even figure out how to save the css file I was working on in Vivaldi FFS.

Perhaps there's a plugin or something. I do hope so. I'd like to reduce the cons of this browser down to 'image rendering is shit', because the other features are piling up in the pros column and its already having a positive impact on my workflow.

---

I wrote the above last night. Then, today, missing Firefox like whoa after Vivaldi did something else weird (fonts, now, for some reason it wants to display Verdana—shut up, I'm nostalgic—entirely in bold WTF), I went looking for an answer to my valuable screen real estate issue.

And I found it. It required me digging in the .mozilla folder and creating a CSS file, but Honey, I Shrunk The Tab Bar! The top chrome of Firefox is now even smaller than Vivaldi!

'Course, I'm still really liking Vivaldi's web panels and built in RSS reader and Reading List and Task List and Notes app... And I kinda figured out the dev tools, except saving files is a bitch and a half, and it crashed on me today, losing a whole bunch of CSS I'd just edited.

So I'm thinking Firefox will probably be my webdev browser, and Vivaldi will probably be my other stuff browser, cos it's good for social media and reading and shit.