Refused Asylum

 Well, I certainly didn't expect to be typing not one, but three blog entries in one week - let alone three on a theme of moving home (or not).

No, there's still nothing wrong with the XPS that a binary blob (and a new battery) wouldn't fix, though after a bit of a disaster upgrading from Ubuntu MATE 21.04 to 21.10-beta, I'm currently running openSUSE Tumbleweed, which, although it has its quirks, is certainly an easier thing to get to grips with than the new Safari. (As an inveterate distro-hopper who nevertheless has never spent much time on openSUSE, I think I'll keep it around for a good while, this time, and see how it strikes me over an extended period of use.)

Yes, you can change the new Safari tab bar back so it's separate from the address bar; yes, you can move the address bar from the bottom back to the top. Unfortunately, you're stuck with the new tab bar redesign, since the option to turn them back into the old-style tab bars is gone from Safari since beta 2.

And it looks like @$$. 

One can only speculate as to why Safari thought moving to a tab style reminiscent of Firefox 89 and later's Proton redesign was a good idea (Mozilla's own thinking on this subject is best thought of as the latest in a long line of terrible design decisions which are turning off users.) Not that I'm particularly important - still less, I suspect, a trendsetter - but it was around the same time that the news of Firefox's precipitous decline broke that I decided to flee Firefox, ending up, pretty much full-time on the desktop at least, in Vivaldi. It will be interesting to see, in the fullness of time, whether I turned out to be the 46-million-and-first, or the fifty-millionth, user to leave Mozillaville.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's a couple of reasons why a Linux user shouldn't really be using Vivaldi. One, it's based on Chrome, and we Linux users don't like monopolies - that's one of the reasons, alongside a quirk of ancient history, why there are so many desktop environments out there - and happily so, since it means it's relatively easy for users and developers to jump ship when they feel it is necessary.  Firefox, of course, is based on its own browser engine, and it was partly Opera's shift from its own browser engine Presto to Chromium's Blink that prompted von Tetzchner to quit the company he founded and of which he had been CEO until that point.

Another reason is that Vivaldi is proprietary, so if Vivaldi Technologies ever goes under - which is a distinct possibility, given that Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner is funding the development of the browser himself (though they do have other sources of income) - the customisations that Vivaldi brings to the table could be lost to history. Alternatively, Vivaldi Technologies could make the software open source, as Netscape, most famously, did with Netscape - which became Firefox - Sun Microsystems did with Solaris (before Oracle closed the source again) and some people still hope IBM will do for OS/2 (though they probably never will). 

So, given all that, why use Vivaldi at all?

Because (IMHO, of course), it's damn good.

I've been using Vivaldi, on and off, since it was nothing but a "Technology Preview" (often, only decamping from Firefox to view a YouTube video in Vivaldi, since it has support for Chromecast and therefore I can watch YouTube on my big-screen TV.) And ever since then, IIRC, it has squirrelled away menus in a hamburger icon. But, and again, it's a big "but," it's still possible to change Vivaldi's behaviour to display menus at the top of the window, as G-d intended. Actually, G-d, or at least Steve Jobs, always intended them to be visible at the top of the screen, but hey, you can't have everything. (I'd be happy for them to migrate back behind the touch of a mouse button.) 

It has customisable options for everything from tab position (do you want them at the top, at the bottom, at the left or at the right - and do you want a preview of your tab along with its title?) to separate settings for default and private-window search engines (and you can decide whether to show a separate search button beside the address bar - I don't). 

Whoa, boy! I can hear you say. That's way too much customisation.

No, no there's no such thing as "way too much customisation." I have an aunt who used  to live in a three-storey house when her kids - my cousins - and I were small; I currently live in a ground floor flat. There are houses with the living room upstairs. My best friend, despite being considerably taller than myself, likes small phones like the iPhone SE; I often regret not going for the iPhone Pro Max - and I loved my Samsung Note 9. One-handed mode is listed on iOS under "Accessibility;" despite being disabled, I turned it off.

Point being, there's no "one size fits all," and it's as true of computers (and related devices like tablets and smartphones) as it is of clothes and houses. 

So it was a shame to discover that sadly, there's no Vivaldi for iOS yet. Never mind that iOS basically forces the browser engine to be Safari - as you will hear in the YouTube video linked above, (I few examples of which I already listed) Vivaldi changes the Chromium interface radically. More importantly, Vivaldi gives you choices.

Choice is good. Choice is what prevents life from being boring, or stagnant. Lack of choice is fine, if what you have is good enough - I'd rather have health insurance I can afford, even if I don't have a choice than the "choice" of several health insurance plans I can't afford and which I can't get because I have a preexisting condition. And I'd like everyone else to have health insurance, too - but when you don't like what you have, and you can't change it, that sucks. 

Even if Linux never existed, you still have a choice of sticking with a Windows PC (of which there are many choices of manufacturer) or going with Apple. But when Apple make a change people don't like, that sucks. 

The new Safari sucks enough that Apple had to give people the choice of moving back the  address bar to the top of the window (done), and separate the address bar from the tabs (done), but the new "tabs" - reminiscent of the ones that sent me, screaming, away from Firefox into the loving arms of Vivaldi: They suck.

Rant over. Until next rant time.