I started trying Vivaldi a while back, mainly due to performance issues. It's missing some of the features I've grown to like about Firefox and has some additional bugs, but overall it's considerably faster.
Somehow I'm not getting much improvement in speed with 57, it's been a bad transition technically for me too, aside from the privacy/marketing - lost addons (expected, but still), broken fonts, bookmarks not working, one users profile completely broken (other ones on same computer are fine), slow page load, lots of freezes, ... reversing the changes to the newtabpage and such.
Worst update in ages for me, only one as bad was one of the teens (19.0?) which needed new profiles making. I've only been using it since v0.6 or so though ^_^
Opera can’t be considered trustworthy as of this event (cribbed from Wikipedia):
On 18 July 2016, Opera announced it had sold its browser, privacy and performance apps, and its name to Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I Limited Partnership (a consortium of Chinese investors including Qihoo 360) for an amount of $600 million USD.
Because it's impossible to run a >$600 million US-Dollar business in China without involvement from the Chinese government. The same government that heavily spies on its citizens and blocks access to the internet with a huge firewall.
Not a downvoter, but I wouldn't change browser over those things, the browser is too important to any real computer nerd. An alternative browser would have to be open source, maintained by a major group, and have functionality that even the big two only achieve via third party addons.
That's not a reason not to use a fork though, I'm looking at Waterfox, but need to assess if I can trust the devs.
It's a huge annoyance, Mozilla seemed to have kept their ethics intact even with all the Google money but this is the last of several marketing blunders that to me show controlling forces on Firefox have sold out to commercialism over ideals.
Ideally Firefox will root out whoever has lead this current thrust towards selling out users.
You're right, the browser is so vital, that's why I've stuck with FF through technical issues in the past. I really don't trust them now.
