I’m using Vivaldi 90% of my time on the net. No big deal, you say? Maybe.

Well, actually no. It’s a bit more complicated. Please bear with me.

I’ll be 44 years old next year, so this whole Internet/WWW is not new to me. I first encountered the internet using some early version of Netscape, probably 1.something (I’m not sure here, it’s been a while, early/mid nineties) on an AIX machine at university. I was hooked and fascinated  (and I’m looking at classic Netscape mug from the good ole days while typing this). I became loyal to a point that I even bought a copy of Netscape disks just to have them (Netscape wasn’t free back then, but you could use it for free— still to this day I cant wrap my head around that one); I still have them lying around somewhere, probably together with some old Netscape T-shirts.

The usenet was a big thing, in the 90s, and I participated in the various Netscape newsgroups. Good times. I started my own little German FAQ about Netscape 4 in the late 1990s. It was simply part of the fun.

To cut a long story short…

When, in 1998—in the middle of the browser wars— Netscape decided to release the Netscape Communicator code and to hand over its development to he newly-created Mozilla Organization, I was on board. It came quite naturally.  Then AOL bought Netscape. It didn’t bode well. But the code was free and Mozilla.org was working on the next generation of the browser suite, aptly named Mozilla, as the basis for further Netscape releases.

In early 2000, Netscape 6 was released. It was a disaster. Based on early, unfinished and unpolished Mozilla code it was received with scathing reviews.

And what did I do? I started a Netscape 6 FAQ, in German (later also in English). There are snapshots of my website from those days on archive.org. (For the ages, for the ages… 🙂 because the first backup there reads, in German, “Offline because I lost the data”.  But there’s an intact one here) <showing-off>My FAQ used to be the main FAQ for the various German newsgroups about Netscape/Mozilla in those days and for quite some time after </showing-off>.

When Mozilla switched to Firefox and Thunderbird I was there as well, providing help and support. It’s still all there on my current website.

I also used Opera for quite some time, on the side, but never as my main browser (but I faithfully bought a copy of Opera nonetheless). But I appreciated its features and snappy browser engine.

It’s been a long ride, and an interesting one.

Then Vivaldi came along.

When I first installed Vivaldi I felt right at home. Everything was there. I’m a desktop user, always will be, be it on Windows or Linux, and using Vivaldi just felt right.

I’m not a heavy add-ons user. But one example. I can’t live without mouse gestures. And it’s a hassle nowadays, with Firefox, to find a good add-on for the task. With Vivaldi, I have this feature on board and it works like magic.

Vivaldi is powerful and fast. It’s clever. Charming. Its features are intriguing. It’s been my default browser on all my PCs for months now.

I have to say—I sometimes almost feel bad about it 😉

Now, dear folks at Vivaldi, bring the thunder and release an e-mail client and I’ll also consider switching from Thunderbird,. 🙂

---

Featured image by Sebastian Mantel on Unsplash