TL;DR
Vivaldi browser has 1 killing feature, that no other browser has implemented. It can turn any website into a progressive web app.
Ever wanted to have Google Translate or GMail as a web app? No problem! From this point, you could jump directly to How to section.
Background
I have many browsers installed on the systems I use. I use most of them simultaneously.
- Firefox for strictly work related private web sites (such as company portal, knowledge base) only. With a minimal set of trusted plugins.
- Brave as a primary browser for personal use and main browser for everything else, which isn't company private. Brave's out of the box security is great.
- Edge as a secondary browser next to Brave. I use it primarily for Microsoft CoPilot and ChatGPT.
- Google Chrome for installing progressive web apps (such as WhatsApp, Google Meet or RegEx101).
- Opera for anonymous browsing. I never log into sites using Opera.
- Chromium for automated frontend testing. Occasionally.
Vivaldi joined the group recently and immediately climbed to same shelf as Google Chrome. I primarily use Vivaldi for web apps that aren't yet progressive (such as JSONFormatter, JSONDiff or Google Translate.
Why is Vivaldi great?
My use case
I use many browsers. In these browsers I have many tabs. I like it that way. There are many things I want to come back to later on. Some things I check occasionally. I don't like to use favourites.
I use JSONFormatter a lot. JSONDiff too. Google Translate helps me from time to time. I simply want to switch to them quickly. I don't want to have it in a browser.
How to
It's ridiculously simple — no extensions, no extra setup, and it works for any website, even the ones that aren't proper PWAs yet.
Here's exactly what I do:
- Open Vivaldi and navigate to the site you want (e.g. JSONFormatter, JSONDiff, Google Translate, whatever).
- Right-click the tab on the tab bar.
- From the context menu choose Install [website name] (if the site supports full PWA) or Create a shortcut (for everything else — this is the killer part).
- Click Install in the tiny confirmation popup.
Done.
The site now lives as its own standalone window, just like WhatsApp or Google Meet do in Chrome. No browser chrome, no stray tabs, no digging through bookmarks or favourites. You can pin it to your taskbar/start menu/dock, launch it with one click, and it feels exactly like a real app.
That's it. That single right-click is why Vivaldi instantly earned the same spot in my workflow as Chrome. Every utility site I use regularly now has its own clean little window, and I can keep my main browsers for actual browsing instead of permanent tab graveyards.
Originally published as GitHub Gist #7fc4de46270ba1ced2f46dc654c21add