For over a year, Vivaldi has been my go-to web browser after leaving Microsoft Edge behind. It wasn't perfect, but Vivaldi came really close with a lot of things, and I loved using it. Until it decided to stop working properly and wasting my time, which forced me to find an alternative.

The reasons I loved Vivaldi were more than it just being a great browser. It was my email client and an RSS feed reader that allowed me to stay on top of news (which is pretty important for someone in my position). So replacing it wasn't as simple as it may seem.

Why I stopped using Vivaldi

Some things are just too frustrating

I was pretty vocal about loving Vivaldi while I used it. In addition to the compact UI and great productivity tools, I loved that it basically allowed me to replace my email client. Vivaldi wasn't perfect, though, sometimes it would suggest odd picks in the address bar and make it harder to get to the places I actually wanted to visit.

But it was only recently that the browser completely lost me. I started having an issue where the top suggestion in the address bar would take a second to be automatically selected, so I would open a new tab, type in "xda" and hit Enter, only to find myself in a Google search rather than the XDA homepage because I did it too quickly. It got old very fast. I waited some time, though, as I hoped it would be fixed with an update. It wasn't and the issue started happening on all my PCs, so I simply couldn't stick with it.

The last straw was the fact that Vivaldi didn't have an Arm version generally available when I reviewed my first Snapdragon X Elite laptop. I'd be okay with that normally, but I had already been thinking about switching for a while, so it was the final nail in the coffin.

Brave: My new browser

Lightweight and fast

I wasn't sure where to go after ditching Vivaldi. I knew for a fact I wasn't using Google Chrome, which I've avoided ever since I've known about its existence, and I couldn't go back to Microsoft Edge, either. Firefox would have been a fine alternative, but I wasn't sold on it, either.

I've heard great things about Brave, so I decided to give that a try, and as it turns out, it was a good one. Brave is a very lightweight and nimble browser. It launches quickly and everything is very snappy, more so than just about every browser I've used. I had similar findings when I did some brief tests for our list of the best web browsers for gaming, but actually using it as my main browser made those benefits all the more obvious.

One of the cool things about Brave is the built-in adblocker, which is on by default, but it also has a built-in VPN (if you pay for it), and it doesn't try to shove anything crazy down your throat. I could do without some of the Web3 crypto features it has, but they're not intrusive.

Brave also doesn't seem interested in collecting your data, but it manages to offer modern capabilities. You can sync your data across devices, but you don't have to create an account with an email address or anything like that. Instead, when you first set up the browser, you can set up a Sync Chain, which generates a random code made up of 25 words. You then enter that code on a new device to add it to the chain. The code also changes frequently so you can't just keep using the same one, so you can't expose your password by just writing it down in an unprotected sticky note. You need to have access to Brave at almost all times to add new devices to the sync chain.

What I miss from Vivaldi

Brave nails all the basics of a web browser, in my opinion, but there are small things I miss from Vivaldi, even excluding the additional features like the RSS reader and email client. One notable one is the ability to tile two tabs side-by-side in the same window. I often have to juggle multiple tabs at once, and this is a useful feature that makes things much easier for me. It's not exclusive to Vivaldi, either, but for some reason, Brace doesn't have it yet.

Another smaller one is one of the options that appears in the context menu: Copy link text. I didn't think this would be that useful, but when I started writing weekly reports, I used this a lot to copy the titles of articles without any formatting. This has made it noticeably more time-consuming to write said reports.

Feeder: An RSS feed reader

Keeping up with the news

Brave may not have an RSS feed reader built in, but thankfully, there are plenty of options out there with extensions that do the same thing, so this wasn't overly difficult. Feeder is an RSS feed reader that works on all kinds of devices, with both a web version and mobile apps.

The app does come with various paid tiers, but the free version is more than enough for my needs. Through the extension, I can easily see how many new items are in my feeds, and I can read the headlines easily without having to switch tabs, so it's easy to stay on top of everything. I can add up to 250 feeds in the free plan, so that's plenty for me, but the paid plans do have perks, including faster update times (the free version updates every 30 minutes at most).

Feeder can sync your feed list across devices if you sign in, but you can also import and export OPML files if you'd rather not create an account.

Mozilla Thunderbird

A surprisingly good email client

The part of Vivaldi that was hardest to replace was actually the email client. Prior to Vivaldi, I used Mail and Calendar on Windows, but since Microsoft killed off that app and replaced it with a much worse version based on the web app, I knew I wasn't going to go back to it. I did hear great things about Spark, but the problem with that app is that I really don't like when apps try to decide for me how emails should be grouped or presented. I didn't like that Spark marked some emails as newsletters, others as people, and so on. It made it more confusing than anything. I also didn't like its distinction between marking as done or marking as read, which was also just confusing.

So my hopes turned to Mozilla Thunderbird. I actually thought this email client was defunct after some financial troubles a few years ago, but not only is it still in active development, it's been significantly modernized in recent years. The UI is clean and easy to get to grips with, it supports all my email accounts with no hassle, and it shows all my emails in a unified inbox (optionally), with the ability to simply filter them by unread status. That's all I needed, and it does this job pretty well. It also quickly marks emails as read just by selecting them, so it doesn't take very long to clear my inbox. That may seem minor, but some clients need to wait for the message to fully load to mark it as read, so I'm glad I can do it quickly here.

The team behind Thunderbird even recently took over development of K-9 Mail, an email app for Android that's been around for a while. I like using the same service on both of my devices, even if the practical benefits are minimal, so this has also become my email app on Android. Eventually, the app will be rebranded, so the names match, but for now, I'm happy with this setup.

How Thunderbird could be better

As much as I like Mozilla Thunderbird, I do have a couple of issues with it. One of the more notable ones is that it doesn't remember my filters. I usually filter my inbox for unread messages, but I have to do it again every time I launch Thunderbird, since it never remembers my previous setting.

Another problem is that Thunderbird can be pretty slow to load new messages, and sometimes the UI will slow down to a crawl while content is loaded. It makes it a bit longer than necessary to get through my inbox.

I also wish Thunderbird wouldn't try to download every message very by default, as it contributes to making things slower during the initial setup. Syncing the last 30 days would be more than enough for me, as long as I can locate older messages by searching for them.

It's not a perfect solution, but it works

There are things I prefer about my new setup and replacement for Vivaldi, but I would be lying if I said I didn't wish Vivaldi would still work the way it used to. Having all these tools in one place was more convenient, and some of the faults of the alternatives I'm now using do make things a bit more of a pain.

That being said, this setup has been working well for me, and Brave is a pretty good browser. It's very snappy and light on resources, which I always like to see. Hopefully, either Vivaldi fixes whatever was happening or the solutions I'm now using will improve over time. If not, this solution is good enough for my needs as it is.