Vivaldi is REALLY good, but nowhere near as good as people make it seem

After reading so many people praising Vivaldi for being simply superior to every other browser for the average user, and trashing Brave in every aspect, I decided to give it a try, I've been on Vivaldi for a week and a half, and honestly, I'm both impressed and pretty damn disappointed at the same time

The Good:

• Mouse Gestures, Dear. Fucking. God. where have they been my WHOLE LIFE? they make navigating SO DAMN GOOD, SO DAMN EASY, it's so fucking responsive, it's feels SO natural, honestly, this is THE reason I'm sticking with Vivaldi for the time being, I'm not capable of letting go of mouse gestures in the slightest, I can't live without them anymore, yes I can add mouse gestures as extensions, no they're nowhere near close to how good it works in Vivaldi, thank you so much but I'm sticking with these
• Ad Blocking, on the first boot of Vivaldi, you set the Ad Block to the highest level, and you forget about it, done, it works really well fresh out of the box, nothing else needs to be said
• A high level of customization, yes, it is extremely customizable, you can definitely set up a LOT of stuff and incredibly small details so Vivaldi feels tailor made for you
• Vivaldi specifically feels like it was made to work with Linux, I can't exactly point how, but it feels like it matches with my whole setup, distro and environment, I navigate my desktop mostly with keyboard only and my mouse navigates mostly my browser, it's an extremely weird but comfortable combination, maybe it's just me, but I love it
• It's got plenty of settings that implement and improve the addition of extensions, I don't personally use them, but they are for sure a life saver for making the experience way smoother
• I never thought I'd need a side panel like the Panel in Vivaldi, it makes it extremely easy to have quick tools at hand that you'd usually open a 3rd app or a whole new tab, it for sure makes life WAY easier, even more so for those who work with their browser, having a translator at hand at all times and a note taking tool is REALLY damn helpful, also having the downloads displayed in that same tab and being able to open a temporary tab in that same panel is a very fun tool to explore and add plenty of quality of life additions, like having quick access to Wikipedia is actually amazing
• It's got a great capability to integrate Linux into the browser, Plasma Integration makes using your browser with KDE Plasma an amazing experience, and it's a blessing for those who actually love to customize their desktop to be their most comfortable zone
• It can change how a lot of stuff work, not just how they look and how they're positioned, which makes navigating different sites and working and switching tabs incredibly damn nice, like you can set how when closing a tab it opens another designated tab, it can open the next or the previous one, which is honestly something I didn't know I could use in my life but now that I have it, it's been quite eye opening

The Bad:

• Vivaldi is has a brutal customization, but honestly, most of it feels absolutely useless, you could 100% take out 50% of the settings and Vivaldi would work and feel exactly the same, most of these are extremely niche and are there for VERY specific purposes, 99.9% of the time these settings will not be touched, the 0.1% could use them, but they're not even necessary and can be easily worked around
• Vivaldi has a LOT of customization capabilities but lacks some EXTREMELY important settings, like disabling the side panels completely, I'm using the Auto Hide preset where none of the tabs or the side panels are visible unless you hover over them, and the top and bottom panels are extremely useless, their content can be swapped to the tabs but you cannot disable them, they are just there to be annoying, not being able to move the Settings Icon from the bottom Panel to somewhere on the Tabs on either side is plain stupid
• Ad Blocking is nice for the main sites, but you need extensive setup for it to work on other sites like local news, random popups from popular sites even like Nexus Mods are still there asking you to disable the ad block, it can be fixed, but it's very, VERY annoying

The Ugly:

• It's a buggy mess, first time I set up Vivaldi, I got a shit ton of black screens, somehow Vivaldi's connection was extremely slow, and there's been no fix for months for the Black Screen bug as far as I'm concerned, it's only when I reinstalled CachyOS that I could set up Vivaldi from scratch and managed to not face any of the bugs
• It's got too many settings, and when I say too many, I mean it, TOO MANY, the search bar for settings works nicely, but trying to figure out everything is a brutal hassle, if you wanna customize is so your keyboard shortcuts are best for you personally, you have to go for like a hundred (or two) EXTREMELY specific cases in which you can put a shortcut, and honestly, at that point it feels more like a very tedious chore than just making sure the browser feels good
• Complementing the 2nd point in the Bad section, despite there being SO many customization options, it lacks some that people actually look for, for example, I've been trying to figure out for a couple of days how to disable the side panels and make them a keyboard shortcut instead, like I don't want to hover my mouse over the tabs on the right side of the screen, I want them to be permanently hidden and show only with a shortcut, but there isn't even a shortcut option to show the tabs, but there is for switching the tabs from sides (which overlap with the other panels) which should be just a one time setting that you forget after messing with the settings, I mean there's even fucking shortcuts to apply a fucking sepia filter to the browser but not a shortcut to hide/show my tabs? come the fuck on dude
• Vivaldi Ad Block tends to break plenty of sites, and when I mean plenty, I mean PLENTY of sites, you need to tweak it pretty damn well and add a lot of exceptions for Vivaldi's Ad Block to be good enough (there are presets done which help a fucking lot)

Conclusion:

Vivaldi has a ton of extremely good stuff that make it a REALLY good option for the average user, even more so for those who like to tinker around with stuff, but it really lacks a shit ton of key settings and implementations that people actually could look for, and for the ad block to work nearly as good as Brave's, you need to extensively tweak it and add a lot of exceptions for it to not break sites, something that hasn't happened to me with Brave since I started using it like 3 years ago except for sketchy sites and DNS blocked sites like with Japanese or Chinese ones

As soon as Brave implements the Mouse Gestures (and if it works nearly as good as Vivaldi's), and hopefully a bit more settings to tweak it (like tab stacking), I'm almost certain to switch back to it, until then, I'm sticking with Vivaldi