On a whim, I recently decided to give the
Vivaldi browser a spin, and I am now a huge fan. I've made it my main browser for both home and work, and even on my phone.
It has several things built in that other browsers need extensions for, including blocking ads, full-page screen captures, and a full-featured start page. My favorite thing is what they call Web Panels. They're basically pinned tabs, except they work like the auto-hide panels in MusicBee. They just pop out on top of whatever else you're doing. It's great for search engines, email, anything like that. You can see in my screenshot that I have Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, and Gmail set up. At work, I have one that is basically a "drawer" for my google drive - I can find the file I want in the web panel, and clicking on it opens it in a new tab. They're designed to use the mobile view of a website, if available, but you can easily switch back to desktop (gmail's a little bit of a challenge there, but still doable).
You can have the web panel on the left or right, I just happen to have it on the right. You can see that it also shows bookmarks, downloads, history, a notes panel, and "windows" panel, which is sort of like history, but based more on tab and window management. It also tracks changes on pages you have open and can, optionally, tell you when something is updated. This goes along with a setting to reload tabs periodically, if you want to.
The left side in my screenshot is my tabs. You can have them on top, bottom, left or right - with or without text, with or without thumbnails. I wasn't sure I was going to like having them that small, but I've gotten used to it pretty quickly (I turned off the close tab button and turned on closing with double-click). I also have my taskbar on the left, so it's already natural to reach left when I want to switch between things.
Putting the address bar in the title bar takes a CSS file and a little fiddling, which I'll be happy to share if anyone is interested. That was the clincher for me. I don't want things crowded, but I hate wasted space. This couldn't be much more perfect, in terms of layout. Ok, I could stand to have the tab icons a *little* bigger, but that might be adjustable with css. I'll have to see. There've been a few challenges with pages not loading right due to security settings, but they've all been resolved.
There are lots of other settings to mess with. It really compares with MusicBee in terms of flexibility. And the forum and update cycle seem comparable, too. I was initially having a problem with downloads in the web panels, but it was already resolved with the release that came out yesterday.
(click for larger view)
