Vivaldi Web Browser is Now Available as a Snap

Vivaldi web browser has arrived on the Canonical Snap Store – officially.

This closed-source, Chromium-based web browser has been available on Linuxsince its debut in 2015, providing an official DEB package for Ubuntu users (which adds an APT repo for ongoing updates).

And last year it became possible to get Vivaldi on Flathub – though that Flatpak build is only semi-official: maintained and packaged by a Vivaldi engineer, but not a recommended or supported package by Vivaldi itself – not yet, anyway!

So to hear Vivaldi is embracing the Snap format is an interesting, albeit not surprising, move.

Vivaldi Comes to the Snap Store

Vivaldi’s CEO Jon von Tetzchner says the team is providing an official Vivaldi snap package because snaps are a universal packaging format that work across multiple Linux distributions. This makes it easier for them to get Vivaldi to the widest audience, irrespective of their distro choice.

In theory — snaps are universal and do run on most major Linux distributions but there remains a lot of antipathy towards the format outside of Ubuntu. Take Linux Mint, based on Ubuntu. It doesn’t just not offers snaps, it prevents snaps from being installed without manual workarounds.

But hey: plenty of people (myself included, as much as it may shock some) use snaps if/as/when needed. I care about the app or package more than the format. If it works, and I can get the software I need, I don’t really care how.

Vivaldi Snap or DEB?

Reading this (perhaps in Vivaldi) and wondering if there’s a compelling reason to switch from the Vivaldi DEB to the new Vivaldi Snap package?

Tetzchner says users can ‘expect the same feature-rich, privacy-focused experience that Vivaldi is known for’ with the snap, with the added security benefits of running the app in a sandboxed environment.

Plus, snaps update automatically in the background. For Vivaldi, this means users are almost always going to be running the latest version (with the newest features, security, and bug fixes) as soon as it’s release, without them needing to ‘manually update’.

In all honestly, there won’t be that much difference – so the choice of snap vs DEB comes down to your own preferences. I have capped internet so I’ll stick with the DEB as the downloads are significantly smaller.

Install the Vivaldi Snap

Vivaldi is free, proprietary software. In addition to the snap, it’s also available in traditional Linux packaging formats (including for Linux on ARM), as well as macOS and Windows.

If you’ve not tried this browser before, there’s a lot to like about Vivaldi because, quite honestly, there is simply a lot in Vivaldi!

It has features – a lot of features (however niche), and settings too – a lot of settings (to control, modify and personalise the experience wholly).

Vivaldi is also big on privacy but, honestly, on Linux, which web browser isn’t?

Oh yeah, that one ;)

Anyway, if you’re as ‘thrilled’ by news of a Vivaldi snap as the team is to announce it’s made one, do go ahead and try it out — you will pop back to let me know what you think of it (assuming Disqus loads better than in Firefox) once you’re done, yeah?

• Get Vivaldi on the Snap Store

Appreciated Motang!