'Vivaldi—makers of the power user's favorite Web browser—has finally released a mobile version. Vivaldi for Android (sorry iOS users, it's Android-only for now) brings most of what's great about Vivaldi to your phone, and thanks to Vivaldi's sync service, you can even have all your desktop data on your mobile device.

Web browsers are perhaps the most important piece of software we use in 2019. Our devices are often little more than small windows onto the Web, and the browser is what we use to see and explore what's in that window. For all its importance though, the modern browser, especially the mobile Web browser, offers precious little in the way of features. It displays the Web and... that's about it. Want to interact with what you see? You're mostly out of luck.

Most people probably like their browser this way. Google, maker of the most widely used mobile browser, rarely does anything without extensive user testing. If Chrome is minimalist, it's safe to assume it's that way because Google has determined that's what its users want. And since most other browsers copy whatever Google Chrome does, most mobile Web browsers end up as minimalistic pieces of software.

On the desktop, of course, there has long been an exception to the uniformly dumbed-down offerings of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—Vivaldi.

Led by CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera, Vivaldi's primary goal is to build a useful browser, a tool you can bend to your will rather than the other way around. You can customize Vivaldi the way you like. Its preferences may be overwhelming at first glance, but if you dig in, you can make Vivaldi do just about whatever you want it to do. For this reason, Vivaldi is often called a "power user's browser" (as opposed to, I guess, the powerless user's browser).

For all that, there was always one big problem with Vivaldi: it was desktop only. The company said it was working on a mobile version from the beginning, and von Tetzchner told me several times he was already using it. But there was nothing for the rest of us.

Now Vivaldi Mobile is here (again, for Android users at least). Technically, it's a beta release and all the common cautions regarding beta software apply, but I've been using it for over a month now and have had no problems. Or, I should say, I have had problems, but updates prior to the public release eliminated all of them. And even if there were still bugs, Vivaldi would still be more useful than any other browser on my phone based on this recent testing—and yes, I've tried nearly all of today's mobile browsers, even the small, cottage efforts.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/vivaldi-mobile-review...

Cheers, Peter