Vivaldi

Vivaldi is a safe, privacy-friendly browser, and on paper one of the cleanest we have scored. It cannot see your browsing history, it encrypts Sync with a key only you hold, and both app stores show almost no data collection. The trade-offs are a small security team with no paid bug bounty and protection you need to switch on yourself. We score it 80/100, level with Brave and well ahead of Opera (67).

Is Vivaldi safe?

For most people, yes. Vivaldi is built on Chromium, the engine behind Chrome and Edge, so it gets the same core sandboxing and the same stream of security fixes. Vivaldi follows Chromium's Extended Stable track, which means its version numbers lag Chrome's half the time, but its security page says the fixes are still pulled in, usually within a day or a few days of Google's release.

We found no breach of Vivaldi's own systems or user data. Google Safe Browsing runs on desktop and Android and warns about known phishing and malware sites.

The weak spot is how flaws reach Vivaldi. It runs no paid bug bounty: researchers who report a problem get their name in a Hall of Fame. Larger rivals pay. Brave runs a HackerOne programme, although it is paused, and Opera pays on Bugcrowd. A small company with no cash reward attracts fewer outside testers, so more of the checking falls to Vivaldi's own security group.

What data Vivaldi collects

Very little. Apple's App Store label lists location and identifiers used for analytics, not linked to you, and no tracking. Google Play's form goes further and says the Android app collects and shares no data at all.

The privacy policy explains the one routine message. Every 24 hours the browser sends Vivaldi's servers in Iceland a random installation ID, the version, CPU type, screen resolution and time since the last message. Vivaldi removes the last part of your IP address on your device, looks up a rough location and uses the result to count active users by country. Your visited sites, searches and downloads stay in your profile, and the policy says Vivaldi has no access to them.

Vivaldi makes money from partners rather than from your data. Some of the default bookmarks are partner links that share revenue with Vivaldi, and its blocker lets non-tracking ads from partner search engines through by default. You can delete those bookmarks and change the search engine.

Vivaldi Sync and your passwords

Sync is where Vivaldi does better than Chrome. When you turn it on, you set an encryption password of at least 12 characters, separate from your account password. Vivaldi's help page says the data is encrypted on your device and the password is never sent to Vivaldi, so the company cannot read your bookmarks, passwords or tabs. Chrome encrypts Sync end to end only if you set a passphrase yourself.

Save the backup encryption key Vivaldi offers. Without it, a forgotten password and a lost device mean the synced data is gone for good, because Vivaldi cannot reset it for you.

The blocker is optional

Vivaldi includes an ad and tracker blocker based on EasyList and DuckDuckGo's Tracker Radar. It does not run unless you choose it: Vivaldi's own page says the ad blocker is off by default, and the setup screen asks you to choose "No blocking", "Block trackers" or "Block trackers and ads". Even at the strongest level, non-tracking ads on Vivaldi's partner search engines are allowed through until you untick "Allow ads from our partners" in the blocker sources.

No AI assistant, by choice

While Chrome, Edge and Opera add AI assistants, Vivaldi has gone the other way. In an August 2025 post on the company blog, Jon von Tetzchner said Vivaldi would not use a large language model to add a chatbot, summaries or form-filling until more rigorous ways exist. For safety, that matters: the hidden-instruction attacks that hit Perplexity Comet need an AI that reads pages and acts, and Vivaldi has none.

How to set up Vivaldi safely

1. At first launch, choose "Block trackers and ads". You can change the level for each site from the shield icon in the address bar.
2. In the blocker sources, untick "Allow ads from our partners" if you want no search ads at all.
3. When you turn on Sync, pick an encryption password different from your login password, and save the backup encryption key somewhere outside your computer.
4. Delete default bookmarks you did not add.
5. Keep automatic updates on, since Chromium fixes arrive through Vivaldi's own releases.

How we scored it

Privacy (88) and the regulatory record (87) are Vivaldi's strongest factors: almost nothing is collected, and no regulator has fined or ordered the company, though none has examined it closely either. Scams and harmful content (68) is its weakest, as with every general browser: it opens the whole web, rates 16+ and has no parental controls. Security (76) loses points for the missing bug bounty rather than any incident, and transparency and control (78) for the opt-in blocker and partner placements.