The Vivaldi browser is now available on Flathub. It’s been available for 2 weeks now actually, but I didn’t find time to blog about it until today.

When Jon. S. von Tetzchner, the CEO of Vivaldi, asked users for feedback on Mastodon, I replied that it’d be great to have Vivaldi available as a flatpak on Flathub. And he replied that he’d ask the engineering team to look into it since they had also seen a strong demand for Flatpak support among their Linux users on their forums.

They did look into it, but it was blocked by the conflict of Chromium and Flatpak sandboxes for a long time. They were not sure if they could rely on Zypak. In the end it was made available on Flathub in a sort of semiofficial way. It’s published by Vivaldi emploee Ruarí Ødegaard with the company’s approval. And if all works out, the plan is to make it official.

As an old Opera browser fan (I used Opera for over a decade and was very active in the community), I have a soft spot for Vivaldi. I still plan to use Firefox primarily because that’s what we ship and what my team is working on and I want to keep dogfooding, but since I can now easily install Vivaldi on Fedora Silverblue, it will be my second browser.

Firefox and Vivaldi complement each other very well. Firefox aims to be just a browser and strives for simplicity. Vivaldi is truly a spiritual successor to the old Opera. It’s packed with features and offers much more than just a browser (email client, calendar, RSS reader…).

Both companies also share a similar mission to keep the web open and protect users’ privacy. Vivaldi is a small, employee-owned company with no venture capital that would eventually push them to compromise on their mission, no business model based on questionable crypto or injecting affiliate codes into links.

Vivaldi is off to a good start on Flathub with over 12k downloads already. If you’re looking for a powerful browser or Chromium-based alternative, give it a try.