Vivaldi: Possibly the most powerful browser, but some nagging issues

Vivaldi is an interesting browser.  It's probably the most customizable browser on earth, which has allowed me to run it with fewer extensions than any other browser.  Because it's the only Chromium based browser that has proper vertical tabs, it's the only Chromium browser I could seriously consider.  But there are some nagging issues that make it feel not quite as polished as other Chromium browsers (like Chrome, Edge, Opera).  Though it's in a better state than Brave.  Here are some ones I've noticed.

• (MacOS) Right clicking address bar on a blank tab (no URL in address bar) is missing "paste and go option"
• When moving tabs from one window to another, occasionally tabs are lost.  Vivaldi couldn't reproduce this.  "Sometimes" type bugs are hard to squash.
• No native settings UI for autofill options (and other Chrome pages), you have to go to chrome://settings/autofill/. A little embarrassing that this isn't present after all this time, Opera and Edge have it.
• When editing a chrome:// bookmark, the UI is inconsistent (vivaldi://bookmarks main content area doesn't match toolbar or bookmarks sidebar URL) because Vivaldi converts all chrome:// links to vivaldi:// links, even if it doesn't exist.
• Vivaldi links (vivaldi://...) can't be accessed on Vivaldi on Android, which is annoying if you're used to going to those bookmarked links.
• When a save dialog opens, you can click outside the dialog on the web page, which makes the download dialog disappear and no way to get it back.  This is very inconvenient when you're doing bulk downloads (for example on Humble Bundle).
• Some websites (for example https://answers.yahoo.com/ and https://www.walmart.com/ have a different indentation and are missing favicons in the window side panel compared to other sites, which makes it look weird).  Edit: appears to be fixed now.
• Opera is working on a feature called "workspaces" which is similar to Firefox's excellent "containers".  I'm not aware of plans for Vivaldi to offer the same, but they're not very great about sharing their plans, which brings me to the next point.
• Microsoft is more open about their plans for Edge than Vivaldi.  We don't really know what they've prioritized, you can't even see if an issue is a duplicate when you report it, unless someone happens to have made a forum post about it and mentioned the Jira number of the issue they opened.
• Performance isn't as smooth as Chrome or Edge (can't speak to Opera as much).  I can't quite pin this down.  Resource utilization is higher than Chrome, though not dramatically so, and synthetic benchmarks I've seen give about equal results to Chrome (unsurprising since it's the same engine, Blink), yet it doesn't feel as snappy and responsive.
• I once had the sqlite database that stores passwords get corrupted so that saved passwords weren't showing up.  Unfortunately, this meant deleting the database to fix (C:\Users\Keegan\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\User Data\Default\Login Data on Windows or /Users/keeganwitt/Library/Application Support/Vivaldi/Default/Login Data on MacOS).  This might be related to another issue I had at one point where when I clicked the button to delete all saved passwords, only passwords saved directly into Vivaldi were deleted, and imported passwords were not.
• Passwords cannot be edited directly in settings (need to log in with updated password, then click the popup to let it update the saved password).  Shockingly (for people like me that don't use Chrome) Chrome only recently added this (chrome://flags/#edit-passwords-in-settings).
• Syncing tabs between phone and PC is rather delayed, and by more than several seconds, whereas in Chrome and Firefox it's always appeared instantaneous.
• This isn't a Vivaldi issue per-se, but the menu for OneTab when you click on the icon in the toolbar doesn't have the menu with usual options of "send only this tab", "send all tabs", etc.  However, this is still accessible if you right click on the page itself.  The icon for OneTab also is invisible when pinned and using dark theme.
• Several extensions that let you move tabs between windows (e.g. Cluster, Tab Manager Plus, Tabli, Tabs Outliner) don't work right.  For example, when moving tabs out of current window into new window, the tabs still show in current window even though they're moved (it appears the tabs are rendered in both windows, but control the same rendering process -- closing in the original window also closes in new window and the tab in the original window doesn't have anything rendered in it).
• It sorta redundant with Vivaldi's tab stacks, but Chrome's tab groups don't work in Vivaldi (chrome://flags/#tab-groups and chrome://flags/#tab-groups-collapse).
• Tabs still shrink instead of scrolling when there's too many to fit.  You can set a minimum width for the active tab (which is better than nothing), and the vertical tabs and tab stacking help mitigate this issue, but after over a decade of using Firefox (I used it back when it was the Mozilla Browser), I just can't seem to not have my eyes scarred by tiny tabs.
  
• Once whenever I'd open a link in GMail, the new tab would have an empty address bar when middle clicked (or right click and select "open link in new tab"), but not when using "open link in new background tab".  Interestingly, going to address bar and typing Ctrl + Z (to undo) restores the missing URL.  This stopped happening after a browser restart.

I'm gonna keep my eye on Vivaldi, it looks very promising, but in the end, I keep coming back to Firefox (though their recent addition of ad and tracker blocking eliminates one of my reasons for doing so). I'm also a tabaholic and it's tough to move to anything Webkit based with high tab counts because of higher memory consumption.

Experiences with BAT

I've generally been fairly skeptical of cryptocurrency.  I don't doubt that there are applications for which blockchain is the perfect solution, but most of the use cases popularly mentioned are rather unconvincing.  I'm a lurker of /r/Buttcoin and found a lot of logic in the blog post by Ivan Ivanitskiy.

However, I am rather intrigued by what Brave and BAT are doing.  I run an ad-blocker because some sites are running ads that are just ridiculously obtrusive (and/or malicious).  But it's a real problem for how the internet gets funded.  A huge portion of the internet, mobile apps, etc are funded largely by ads, and the question of how digital content will be funded in the future is one of the biggest existential questions facing the internet today.  The work being done on acceptable ads is long overdue and helps address some of those problems.  But there is still a problem of misaligned incentives.  That is, Even if ads never tried to get you to install malware, and were never obnoxious, do users still have an incentive to not run ad blockers?  I don't know if it's perfect, but BAT gets closer than any solution I've seen so far to solving this problem.

But it's kinda broken at the moment due to the frustrations of getting going.  For example, I can't just set up a monthly deposit to keep my BAT wallet funded.  If you use Brave's preferred partner (Uphold), you currently have to transfer money to a fiat card first, then transfer it to a BAT card, then transfer it to Brave's wallet.  Not exactly simple.  Even worse, my MasterCard (Citi and Meijer ) and Visa (Amazon) declined the transaction to fund the fiat card.  Citi told me it was against their policy to allow cryptocurrency transactions.  I presume the other cards have similar rules/restrictions, though I haven't verified yet if that's why the transaction was declined (though I think Visa said something about needing manual verification).  I couldn't even add my Fifth Third or Cabela's MasterCards as funding methods in Uphold.  There was some kind of error.  I can't blame the financial institutions too much for this -- cryptocurrency is used so much for criminal activity, it's not unreasonable for them to be a little cautious.

But this poses a serious problem in adoption.  A lot of folks (especially millennials) don't want to pay anything for anything.  But if it's a pain to pay money to content providers, even when you are willing to pitch a few bucks their way, it makes the entire enterprise rather doomed from the start.  I think Brave has plans to allow you to fund your wallet directly in the browser -- and I think that's really what needs to happen to make the process as painless as possible for users.  Here's to hoping the process gets smoothed out in the future.

Edit: yes, I'm aware I don't have to use Uphold and can use whatever platform I want.  That's how cryptowallets work.  But, the only link in Brave's FAQ is documentation on how to setup Uphold.  I'd expect this is what most users would do.  Only users already comfortable with some other cyrptoplatform would know to do anything different.

My Republic Wireless Review

The Phone

Features

Active Display

I really like this feature.  It can be argued it's a gimmick (I'm not sure it saves that much battery life), but it is nice to quickly see why my pocket is vibrating with just a touch.

Shape

The screen size is a great balance between easy viewing and comfortable holding during calls.  Could have been a touch larger in my opinion, but not a huge complaint.  It's larger than it feels in your hand since they have such a small bezel.  The curve on the also adds to the comfortable fit in your hand.

Touchless Control

I don't use this a ton, but it is nice in the car.  The only thing I don't like is that I can't control everything by voice.  For example, I can talk to send a text, but have to tap confirm.  And non-Google apps don't work (other than being launched).

Quick Camera Access

Twist your wrist, and your camera pops up.  Even if the phone is asleep.  Very convenient.

 Other Notes

The speaker has a reasonable volume and sounds decent.  I never expected to be blown away by the built-in speaker, and I wasn't.

What's Missing?

No expandable storage, but we've come to expect that from Google (remember that Google bought Freescale from Motorola).  It's not the absolute fastest phone out there, or the largest screen, or the best camera (so I've been told -- looks fine to me), but I haven't really had any problems with it.  Could be a tad cheaper given it's benchmark performance, but still not bending you over either.  This phone, like most others has the speaker on the back of the phone which doesn't project the sound the best since you will never be facing the phone away from you.  But if you cup your hand behind the phone, you can bounce the sound back to the front.  Oh, and the phones are not unlocked (though I don't know of any carrier which offers that).

Battery Life

It's not the longest out there, but 24 hours on standby is conservative in my experience.  After 24 hours, I still usually have about 38% left.  The phone does get a little warm with continuous use (e.g. an hour of web browsing).

The Service

Sprint

My evaluation is based on the 3G service in Columbus mostly, and some in the Houston area.  Sprint is the poorest performing network out there.  Everyone knows that.  It's the slowest, and doesn't have the best coverage, but it is cheap, and they make their towers available to lots of little carriers like Republic. I've not had any issues with it for streaming, navigation, email, or texting.  There are some parts of Columbus (like the south side) that have dismal performance.  But even in the fairly good areas (like Dublin), it's not very speedy for things like Youtube and web browsing.  But its better than running from WiFi to WiFi, which is what me and my Nexus 7 were doing before the Moto X.  Surprisingly, I was able to do a video chat with the folks back in Texas for Thanksgiving in Swanton (although it did get dropped a couple times).  I recommend checking Sprint's results on http://www.rootmetrics.com/ before purchasing.

WiFi

I mostly love this.  It offers full signal strength in my apartment, which is great for those that live in buildings a bit far from a tower.  How many times have you heard the complaint of a cell phone working everywhere but home?  Only downside is if your Internet isn't quite up to speed.  My parents' Internet struggles to keep up with the load of my siblings' devices and the TVs streaming (they use Aero to stream even regular air TV).  So I opted to disable my WiFi most of the time to avoid terrible call quality.  It does transfer off WiFi in these instances, but it's 10 unintelligible seconds later.  Downside here is there is no way to opt out of WiFi calling without turning off WiFi altogether at least as far as I could tell.  At my apartment though, quality is flawless.  As is WiFi to cell handover (I don't even notice it happen).  One interesting things about the handover is that when on a cell call and moving into WiFi, it doesn't hand the call back to WiFi.  This might be on purpose since they might assume if you're on cell that you're on the move and might move back out of WiFi signal.

The Customer Service

I've heard some people get really rapid responses (like within minutes), but I've been a bit disappointed by my experience.  I had issues with MMS messages displaying (either a picture preview or a group text message) in the default messaging app, and I couldn't reply to a group MMS message in Hangouts.  The way their support works is online only (to save money).  They replied 3 days later with a clearly generic copy/pasted response asking for more information.  I provided that the same day, and haven't heard back from them yet (it's been 3 weeks).  I might contact them again, but I've heard other people say they've had MMS issues with their carrier as well, so maybe there's nothing to be done.

Conclusion

If you are an avid smartphone user already, you might be too spoiled for the Republic option and better served by something like Straight Talk.  But if you are looking for a cheap way into the smartphone game or are looking for a a phone to do calls that doubles as a WiFi Internet device, $10 or $25 a month cannot be beat.  If that sounds like you, use my referral link and save us both $20 each: http://rwshar.es/bbcQ7.  If you have any questions, leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer.

Edit 1: After shaming them on their Facebook Wall, I got a response to my issue. They're currently investigating. They also claim this only affects 0.22% of customers.  I don't know of that's true, but that's what their known issues page says.

Edit 2: I think they started working on this after the holidays.  My issue was updated 1/11 saying they made some changes and to try again.  Everything is working now. :)