Vivaldi

From ArchWiki

Vivaldi is a web browser from former Opera founder & team members, based on Chromium and focused on personalization aspects.

Installation

Vivaldi can be installed with vivaldi or vivaldi-snapshotAUR. Prebuilt packages can alternatively be found in the herecura unofficial repository. For differences between snapshot and stable versions, see this page.

To use Qt instead of GTK dialogs for file selections just install kdialog.

Extensions

Vivaldi is compatible with most of Chrome's extensions. These can be installed directly from the Chrome Web Store.

Tip: Vivaldi supports appending proxy server parameters to the command line with --proxy-server="socks5://127.0.0.1:1080". This may help to solve network connectivity problems under certain conditions.

To see which extensions are installed/enabled, type vivaldi://extensions in the address bar.

See also Wikipedia:Google Chrome Extension.

Media playback

To enable proprietary media (H264, AAC, etc.) playback support:

Making flags persistent

Note: The vivaldi-stable.conf file usage is specific to the Arch Linux vivaldi package.

You can put your flags in a vivaldi-stable.conf file under $HOME/.config/ (or under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME if you have configured that environment variable).

No special syntax is used; flags are defined as if they were written in a terminal.

  • The arguments are split on whitespace and shell quoting rules apply, but no further parsing is performed.
  • Flags can be placed in separate lines for readability, but this is not required.

Below is an example vivaldi-stable.conf file that disables hardware media keys for the browser:

~/.config/vivaldi-stable.conf
--disable-features=HardwareMediaKeyHandling

The vivaldi-snapshotAUR package can get its flags set with the vivaldi-snapshot.conf file.

Modding

Vivaldi has modding capabilities through its browser.html file.

The file can be found at: /opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/browser.html

Another way to find the browser.html path is through the Executable Path section at vivaldi://about/.

You can also use vivaldi-autoinject-custom-js-uiAUR. It can help you manage mods: add or remove them from browser.html, and redo changes at vivaldi updates. For usage, visit the project page.

Tips and Tricks

Transfer your profile to snapshot version

If you switched to snapshot version because of lacking features of stable version, you want to also use your user profile. Copy the ~/.config/vivaldi/Default to ~/.config/vivaldi-snapshot/Default.

Google search suggestions

Vivaldi cannot be shipped with enabled suggestions for google search. The user must manually add the suggestion url https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=chrome&q=%s in search settings.

Native Wayland support

Go to chrome://flags page, then search wayland. You will see the Preferred Ozone platform setting. Set it to auto. The default one is "X11". "Auto" selects Wayland if possible, X11 otherwise.

Keep picture-in-picture window above other windows

When viewing some video, you can press the picture-in-picture button to detach it to a separate window. By default this window is not kept above others and it is inconvenient. To fix it in KDE, create a window rule to keep it above others. See KDE#Using window rules.

Troubleshooting

Chromium page

Some troubleshooting is common for Vivaldi and Chromium, such as for example, force enabling hardware acceleration. For such, consult the Chromium#Troubleshooting.

Generic wayland icon in the taskbar

Currently, there is a bug that vivaldi's window is not recognized by DE as a vivaldi browser. See https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/75556/vivaldi-on-native-wayland-not-showing-app_id. See workaround for KDE here.

Certificates management

Currently (Vivaldi 6.2.3105.54 (Stable channel)), the certificates management setting is missing. To workaround that, manually type the address chrome://settings/certificates. Note, that the address will be changed to vivaldi://settings/certificates, but you cannot type it in the first place (otherwise you will see vivaldi settings where cert management it is missing). See here for more details.