This is the exact Android browser that convinced me to delete Chrome and Firefox on my phone

12 Jun 2026, 20:00 by Oluwaniyi Raji · Android Police

For some months now, I've been running two browsers as daily drivers on my phone, and I'm trying to convince myself it's fine.

Chrome held all my work history and Google logins, and Firefox handled everything personal after I moved my personal browsing to an open source browser to get out from under Google.

The split made sense on paper, but in practice, I spent half my day copying a search out of one app and pasting it into the other because I'd opened the wrong one again.

Vivaldi is that browser that lets me delete both, and it did it without asking me to give up the things that kept me on Chrome in the first place.

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Posts 3
By Rahul Naskar

I split work and personal across two apps

The setup sounded reasonable until I put it into practice

My problem with Google started small and kept growing every time the company did something I didn't like. It peaked when Chrome began disabling uBlock Origin for some users.

I wanted something as far removed from Google's whole shtick as possible. So I went for Firefox, the one major browser that didn't run on Chromium. That solved the principle but not the practice.

My work life stayed on Chrome, so I kept both apps and switched between them all day. I'd open whichever one sat at the top of my recent apps list, but it was rarely the right one.

The friction was small each time, but when spread out over a day, it became too annoying to ignore. I wanted a single browser I could open without thinking about whether I was working or handling personal business.

Vivaldi's features convinced me to make the switch

Tab Stacks turned my messiest habit into the organized part of my day

I'd looked at Vivaldi during my first round of Chrome alternatives and skipped it because it runs on Chromium, which at the time felt like the whole problem I was running from.

Honestly, that was a shallow reason, and I came back after I understood that running on Chromium and inheriting Chrome's decisions aren't the same thing.

While Edge and most mainstream browsers absorb Chromium's changes fairly closely, Vivaldi is more selective about which ones it takes.

The feature that won me over is Tab Stacks. I never work in a single tab, and even on casual browsing, I like opening related tabs in a group.

So, the prospect of cramming work and personal browsing into one app was what I dreaded most about using a single browser.

Tab Stacks let me group related tabs into a single stack that takes up the same amount of space as one tab. To access all tabs in a stack, I tab the header and expand the second row underneath.

Accordion mode does the same job in a different way if the default stacking is not to your taste.

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Posts 42
By Rahul Naskar

The rest of Vivaldi earned its place, too

After tabs were sorted, the smaller features kept stacking up

Tab management got me in the door, but a handful of smaller things are why I stayed.

The first was privacy, which mattered because syncing my browser across devices was exactly the kind of thing I don't trust Google with.

Vivaldi syncs through its own servers and enforces end-to-end encryption by default, so the company can't read your data even if it wanted to.

That's a step up from Chrome's sync, where full encryption is an option most people never turn on.

Then there's the ad and tracker blocking, and this is what kept me despite the Chromium affiliation.

Vivaldi built its own blocker in 2020, specifically so it wouldn't depend on the extension system. This is the same system Manifest V3 gutted for everyone else.

This means I'm not waiting on a crippled uBlock Origin replacement or hunting for a working alternative the way Chrome users are. I want built-in browser blocking, and Vivaldi gives me that.

There are smaller touches like the built-in notes app, separate default search engines for regular and private tabs, and single-letter shortcuts that switch search engines in the address bar.

I especially like the tab cloning feature, which lets me duplicate a tab without manually copying the URL and pasting it in a new address bar.

Chrome doesn't have this, and I never realized how much of a game-changer this feature is on a cramped mobile interface.

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Posts By Irene Okpanachi

It took some adjusting before it felt natural

Moving off a two-browser routine wasn't seamless, and I had to learn how to use Tab Stacks properly.

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In the first couple of days, I'd break a stack by accident and have to drag tabs back into place. But now muscle memory kicks in, and it feels natural.

The stacking also hides how many tabs I actually have open, so my RAM usage shot up before I noticed that all the stacked pages were still running.

Vivaldi has the usual middle-ground tradeoff, too, where it doesn't fit into Google's services as cleanly as Chrome does.

But for how I use my phone, that gap is much smaller than the daily annoyance of running two browsers.

Vivaldi is the one browser I stopped second-guessing

I've ported over my bookmarks and the rest of my odds and ends, and after living with Vivaldi's approach to web advertising, I'm confident it's sticking around.

The Chromium stability I relied on in Chrome is still there, the privacy I went to Firefox for is built in, and I no longer think about which app to open because there's only one.

It's the first browser that feels like it was made by people who keep too many tabs open too often, which is to say people exactly like me.