@brent This post has a ton of comments and I haven't read all of them yet so forgive me if I repeat anything someone else said.
Solarmass the stuff you describe is just unacceptable behavior to me. I guess I have not learned my lesson regarding this company. That's way too much control (and sly over-riding) for my tastes.
WetGeek that said it makes me want to NOT wander from Solus repo---but at the same time it makes me want to avoid ANY chrome source code such as Vivaldi. Or Brave. Or Opera I think. Although I confess the cutting edge idea of Vivaldi-Snapshot sounds like fun.
Prior to 2016 Opera had a HUGE hold over the mobile advertising market in Europe that was greatly enhanced by all the data mining they did with their free VPN. Jon von Tetzchner founded Opera way back when and he started Vivaldi up to try and counter the direction Opera was moving in.
Jon wanted to build a web engine for Vivaldi. The pre-Chromium Opera provided browser competition with their Presto web engine. Developing a web engine takes larges sums of time, effort, and funding. Jon could make Vivaldi a publicly funded company and gain the funds to do this but he is adamant about keeping Vivaldi owned by it's employees.
In 2016 Opera sold their browser, performance and privacy apps, tech licensing and name off to a Chinese consortium for $600 billion dollars. Opera's free VPN feature is now available to be used by Chinese companies to monitor all of the websites and browsing habits of Opera users.
Disclaimer: I'm a Vivaldi Ambassador.
Flatpak Chromium feels like a liability and I'm removing it.
I am serous about my 2-3 browser compartment journey.
Happy with FF and Gnome Web. On the fence with Falkon.
Midori and Eolie sadly unattended to and off the table.
South America's Iconny and Germany's Cliqz and Ungoogled Chromium (will I ever learn?) are the next auditions.
Love the qutebrowser premise but I'm not that smart. Same with Beaker.
This is where my head has been the last few days: separate/compartmentalize---just want to try something new or evolve digitally.
This is going to sound really ridiculous but Vivaldi is NOT my default browser. Firefox is. Vivaldi has an unparalleled ability to retain and recall past browsing history. I use Vivaldi for all of my activism, political organizing and work. But when I am just browsing the web I use Firefox as my default browser to I can separate personal from professional and not gum up my history and cache with unrelated web surfing.
I'm a big fan of Gnome Web. I think it is integrated into the OS exceptionally and installing websites as apps is AMAZING. Those individual website applets can have all of their cookies sand boxed away from one another. For a while Gnome Web was my default browser but it makes my system run like molasses. If the performance were better Gnome Web & its applets would be where I spent most of my time!
I would save myself the headache and just buy into FF's 'containers' if someone could explain to me how one browser magically morphs into 4 distinct browsers...even the documentation doesn't explain it to me conceptually but I ain't the sharpest tool.
As I understand it the different containers provider a sand boxed experience where the cookies from the Work Container only mingle with other websites run in the Work container and the cookies from the Personal Container only mingle with cookies from other sites in the Personal Container.
This is.. ok. I keep my news sites in one Container. It.. might be effective..?
If I need to use a specific app, such as Google Sheets, Microsoft Outlook, or Amazon, I use WebCatalog. (Im not affiliated with Web Catalog, just a user.) WebCatalog does exactly what Gnome Boxes does except it runs much more smoothly on my system. When you install any of the apps in the WebCatalog directory (or create a custom app) it creates a sand boxed web applet run in an Electron wrapper. This separates the cookies from other sites. If you want a dark version Dark Reader is built into the wrapper. If you want to shut off ads you can use Cliqz. The web applets are integrated into your system so if I need to work on a Mirosoft Excel file I press SUPER
and type excel
and the web applet pops up.
The free version allows only two apps to be installed. The paid version lets you have unlimited sand boxed web applets and you can install the apps as a Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera, or Yandex wrapper instead of using Electron. It is the first piece of software I have ever bought because it lets me keep everything separated from everything else.
You would be able to browse Youtube in its own app. The paid version offers a Multisite feature for Google that lets you browser in the exact same way as Eolie intended with all of the sites on the side and you can have your Google Drive, Gmail, Youtube, etc all in one multisite OR installed individually.