On Thu, 6 Dec 2018 10:30:16 -0500, "Mayayana"
wrote:

"Stephen Chadfield" wrote
I don't know what most of your requirements
even mean. Why do I need to zoom so much?

Maybe you don't need such control over zoom levels. My eyesight and
preferences dictate that I do.

Tideways? NordVPN? I don't know what those
are.

I don't care. I wasn't proposing universal requirements. These are my
personal requirements.

How about NoScript, DownloadHelper,
SecretAgent, and 500+- settings options? Does
Vivaldi have those? Is there another reason I
should look at it?

See my comment above.

Oh, wait... One page says, "Take back your privacy".
Sounds good.

But....
Another page says, "When you install Vivaldi browser ("Vivaldi"), each
installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your
computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers
located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu
architecture, screen resolution and time since last message."

And the page goes on to say:

"We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last
octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the
resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup. The
purpose of this collection is to determine the total number of active
users and their geographical distribution."

For me that is not unreasonable.

I know. It's anonymous. Blah, blah, blah. It's spyware.
Calling home with reports is spyware. And sure enough,
after it started it tried to call Iceland without asking.
But then it tried to call Google. (172.217.10.238) Then it
tried to call another Google IP. (216.58.222.174). And
yet another. (216.58.219.238) It's running for 5 minutes
while I look at settings options and it's already tried to
call Google 3 times! What was that about privacy?

In the settings there are options that utilize Google services, such
as fishing and malware protection. They can be turned off.

Yet the search suggestions I don't want are set to
come from Bing. And even when I've turned off both
auto-complete and search suggestions, there they are
as soon as I touch the address bar! With such Bing
infestation, why is it calling Google?

You are not doing it right. The only search suggestions I see are from
from previously typed requests, history and bookmarks. These three
sections are clearly separated and identified in the drop-down menu.

I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine.

There seem to be no settings even for such simple
things as script or tabs. I can't disable script? I can't
not have tabs? I don't know because there seems to
be no help file! (A website is not a help file.) But I sure
can't find those settings.

There is a large settings section devoted to tabs. I don't understand
how you could miss it.

By clicking to the left of the URL in the address bar site settings
can be accessed and JavaScript and other features can be disabled on a
per-site basis.

At one point there was a problem with the install and
it showed me a message saying the install failed. "Please
download Google Chrome again." Did the Vivaldians
actually do anything other than wrap Google Chrome?

This has never happened to me. Maybe there is something wrong with
your computer.

And why can't it load in a normal window? Rule #1
of good software design is don't overrule user choice.
But my only choice is a UI that looks like Mac, with a
Metro-esque design theme. Flat. Boring. Uninformative.

Vivaldi has one of the most customisable browser interfaces I have
seen. This includes native window decorations.