Installing Vivaldi — the web browser

The first post of the year!

Vivaldi is a great web browser. In fact, it is so great that I now use it as my daily web browser. I will not write about why it is so great (now) — but how to install it. I am using Fedora, and Vivaldi is not in the repositories. So you either have to download it as a rpm from their website or install it through fedy. I used the last option. If you do that you evidently first need to install fedy. This is how you do that:

Go to this site

Copy the code in the terminal. You have to be superuser (sudo). After you have done that and the computer has done it’s thing you install Fedy the normal way:

sudo dnf install fedy

After you have installed Fedy open the application and install Vivaldi. It is easy, it is a graphical tool.

After installation you will have some problems. You will not be able to see HTML5-videos and not videos using Digital Rights Management (DRM),  for example Netflix. The solution to these problems can be found on ruario’s GitHub page. Regarding HTML5 see here.

If you are on Ubuntu, this is rather easy to fix. To enable HTML5 you need to download chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra, which is in the repositories

sudo apt update && sudo apt install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra

If you are on Arch the codecs can be found in AUR: vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs.

If you are not in Ubuntu or Arch it is a little more problematic. But ruario has written a bash-script that works just perfect. On the GitHub page it is also described what is happening. So just scroll down and copy the script. Save it and make it executable. If you have named the file in accordance to rurario’s suggestion (latest-proprietary-media.sh), open the terminal, go to the directory where you want to have the file and enter:

chmod +x latest-proprietary-media.sh

Execute the file

./latest.proprietary-media.sh

After you have restarted Vivalid you can see movies on for exampel YouTube.

But you still cannot see movies on Netflix. To be able to do that you will need Widevine. rurario has also written a bash-file the fetch that program. Follow the same instructions as above, but using these codes instead. After that you restart the browser and you will be able to see movies on Netflix.