Manjaro Cinnamon Switches Default Browser To Vivaldi

Manjaro and Vivaldi announced a change to the default browser for the popular community edition Manjaro Cinnamon from the open-source Firefox to Chromium-based Vivaldi. The Manjaro team is hoping that this move gives Vivaldi the attention it deserves according to Bernhard Landauer of Manjaro.

Vivaldi offers many features such as tab grouping, split screen support, built-in mail client, and gestures. Vivaldi also offers many privacy controls such as anti-tracking and ad blocking by default. The company Vivaldi Technologies was founded by Tatsuki Tomita and Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, who was the co-founder and CEO of Opera Software.

Custom Manjaro Theme for Vivaldi

Linux users are typically fans of customizing their systems and Vivaldi has taken note of this and made sure to provide many customization options. You can create unique workflows with customizable shortcuts, gestures, customizable menus, and Command Chains – especially suited to keyboard-based browsing. They also made sure to make the theme just as customizable but they didn’t stop there, Vivaldi has provided a custom Manjaro-Cinnamon theme for a polished out of the box experience.

Is Vivaldi Open Source?

Vivaldi is considered freeware and is not fully open-source, the company has addressed this in a post that can be found here. Vivaldi’s code is described in three layers with the following breakout:

Of the three layers, only the UI layer is closed-source. This means that roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open-source coming from Chromium, 3% is open-source coming from us and only 5% is our UI closed-source code.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/

To learn more about this change you can check out the official news article on Vivaldi’s website which has quotes from both Manjaro and Vivaldi on why this change is a positive for the community.

We would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on this change, head to DLN Forums to let us know.