Before anything else: all settings can be found in Vivaldi's settings dialog. To open the settings dialog, click on the button on the top-left corner of Vivaldi's window, that has Vivaldi's logo, and click on the option Settings... (or press Ctrl+F12). You can use the search box on the top-left corner of the settings dialog to search for words found in the text of the setting to quickly find it. It also has a list-detail interface with settings categories.
Disabling Gestures
There are two settings to disable gestures in Vivaldi: the "normal" gestures and the "rocker" gestures. They're separate for some reason.
Moving Mouse Opens New Tab, Closes Tab, Reloads Page, Going Back, etc.
By default, Vivaldi has gestures that activate when you hold the right mouse button and then move the mouse in a certain way. To fix this, click on the "Mouse" category in the list pane, then uncheck "Allow Gestures."
I often activate gestures by mistake, and never activate them on purpose, so I disable them.
In particular, you can "go back" using a gesture, which sometimes makes you lose everything you typed in a form. This is very annoying when it happens!
Clicking Goes to the Previous Page
To fix this, click on the "Mouse" category on the list pane, then uncheck "Allow Rocker Gestures." This is a separate setting from "Allow Gestures," so even after you uncheck "Allow Gestures" this problem will still persist because "rocker" gestures are a different kind of gesture, apparently.
A rocker gesture occurs when you press multiple buttons of the mouse in a given sequence. By default, if you press the left mouse button and, while it's held, press the right mouse button, Vivaldi goes to the previous page. That is why it happens! In the opposite order, it goes to the next page.
Needless to say, I never activate this gesture deliberately, only by accident, and I absolutely hate misclicking and then having to retype everything because my browser decided to just randomly go to the previous page as if I had clicked a link.
Disabling Tab Bar Changing Colors All The Time
By default, Vivaldi's tab bar automatically changes color to match the color the page in the currently active tab. To fix this, go to the "Themes" category in settings, and change the theme from "Vivaldi" (the default) to something else.
I have no idea who likes this feature. I find it extremely distracting. Though I do admit it will give new users a first impression that your browser is different, I'm not sure if that pays out if they can't figure out how to disable it afterwards.
Tab Navigation Settings
Making New Tab Open After Current Tab
By default, Vivaldi will open a new tab "After Related Tabs," which means the same thing as open "As Last Tab" by default. To make it open a new tab, go to the "Tabs" category in settings, in the "New Tab Position" section, and check "After Active Tab."
By the way, if you are wondering what "related tabs" means in Vivaldi, it means a tab group, also called a tab stack. In Vivaldi, you can stack multiple tabs together, forming a group. To do this, you can select them in the tab bar by holding the Ctrl key and clicking, or holding Shift, just as per convention, then right click on a selected tab to open its context menu and click on "Stack Selected Tabs." I'm not organized enough to do this sort of tab management myself, so I prefer the tab to open right next to the current one.
Making Ctrl+Tab go to Next Tab
By default, Vivaldi will cycle tabs in the order they have been used (activated). This means Ctrl+Tab goes to the last tab you had active, and Ctrl+Shift+Tab would normally cycle to the tab you haven't activated since ages ago. To make Ctrl+Tab go to the next tab in the order it's displayed in the tab bar instead of jumping around like random, go to the Tabs category in settings, Tab Features, Tab Cycling, and change the option from "Cycle in Recently Used Order" (the default) to "Cycle in Tab Order."
Alternatively, there actually is a separate set of keyboard shortcuts for next and previous tab: Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down. You could customize Vivaldi so you have a shortcut for previous in recently used order and previous in tab order, but personally I don't do this.
Making Closing a Tab go to Previous Tab
By default, when you close a tab Vivaldi will switch to the last tab that was active. To make it go to the previous tab in order, go to the Tabs category in settings, "Close Tab Activation" section, and change "Activate in Recently Used Order" (the default) to "Activate Left in Tab Order."
Activate Left vs. Right in Tab Order: if you're like me, you may wonder whether the best choice to select "Activate Left in Tab Order" or "Activate Right in Tab Order." If you press Ctrl+T to open a new tab to the right of the active tab and activate it, and then Ctrl+F4 to close the active tab, you'll go back to where you started if you chose "left." If you choose "right," that won't happen, which can be unintuitive. On the other hand, sometimes I like closing lots of tabs by pressing Ctrl+F4 repeatedly, in which case it feels more intuitive if it activates the tab to the "right," because then Ctrl+F4 works like erasing text with the Delete key, not like the Backspace key.
Disabling Searching goes to Existing Tab
By default, Vivaldi has a feature enabled that will jump to an existing tab if you search for its title in the address bar (omnibox). To fix this, got to the "Address Bar" category in settings, find the "Drop Down Menu Priority" section, and uncheck the "Open Tab" option.
Like many, I'd rather just open the same search page on Google for "how do I do X" five different times than actually find the tab for it I had already open. Previously, one could argue this is because finding the tab is too much of a hassle, so with this "jump to open tab" feature I shouldn't need to have five tabs for the same query open at the same time, right? As it turns out, I don't like "jumping" to a random tab because I like to open a tab right next to the current tab. If it jumps, I get lost. So opening five tabs for the same thing somehow makes more sense to me.
Changing Address Bar Keyboard Focus Shortcut to Alt+D
By default, Vivaldi uses only Ctrl+L as keyboard shortcut for focusing the address bar's omnibox. To make it Alt+D, go to the "Keyboard" category in settings, find a list of items labelled "Window," "View," "Tab," "Page" and so on, click on "Page" to expand its related keyboard shortcuts, and find "Focus Address Field." There will be a textbox with the currently set shortcuts, F8 and Ctrl+L (the default). Click after Ctrl+L on the textbox and press Alt+D to add the shortcut.
It seems other web browsers have both Ctrl+L and Alt+D set for this shortcut. I don't know why Vivaldi has only one of them when it could just have both. Personally, I prefer Alt+D over Ctrl+L because it feels easier to press. I guess it's because I can do it with one hand?
Making Tabs Vertical
By default, Vivaldi displays tabs horizontally in the tab bar at the top just like every other web browser. You can make the tabs appear vertically by clicking on the Tabs category in settings, and changing Tab Bar Position from Top (the default) to Left or Right.
I love vertical tabs, it's one of my favorite features.
A frequent problem that I have in Chrome is that it can only display 92 tabs in the tab bar. I counted. Not even 100, can you believe it? For reference, my screen resolution is 1600x900px. After a few tabs I can only see their icons, not their titles anymore, so I can't tell two tabs apart from the same website, and the 93th tab and forward just aren't displayed at all.
With vertical tabs, not only can I read the title of the tabs no matter how many I have, but I can have hundreds of tabs open in the scrollable tab "bar," which is really a side pane then. I try to separate them in workspaces, but I often forget to switch to a workspace before opening a new tab, then I have to select them and move to the right workspace. It's just too much work.
Also, if you use workspaces, a warning: sometimes Vivaldi may crash or close the wrong way, and the tabs in your workspaces just disappear. Normally I would be able to press Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen a closed tab, and if there are no tabs, reopen the closed window with all the tabs that were closed with it, but in Vivaldi this trick doesn`t work, and Ctrl+Shift+T only reopens a single tab a time. I tried using an automatically saved session to fix this, but when you restore a session, depending on what you click it will open all tabs of its workspaces in a single workspace, or create new workspaces with its tabs, instead of just adding the tabs to workspaces of same name, which is what I would have wanted.
Observation: with vertical tabs, you'll have reduced horizontal space for the webpage's viewport, so some webpages may not work correctly. Hopefully, every webpage supports 1366px wide resolutions, so it shouldn't be a problem if your screen size is 1600px or larger, but it may happen.
Privacy: changing the viewport this manner will make you drastically more unique on the Internet, as most people do not have vertical tabs. If you have concerns about fingerprinting, it's probably not a good idea to use it.
Disabling Drag and Drop Stacking Tabs
By default, Vivaldi lets you drag and drop a tab onto another tab to stack them together. To disable this, go to the "Tabs" category in settings, Tab Features section, Tab Stack Options, and uncheck "Allow Stacking by Drag and Drop." Alternatively, you can disable tab stacking altogether in the "Tab Stacking" subsection next to the "Tab Stack Options."
Personally, I do not use tab stacks. I'm not smart enough to organize all these tabs I open. In some cases I drag and drop a tab to move it closer to another tab, and if stacking drag-and-drop is enabled, I end up accidentally stacking them instead. With vertical tabs, there seems to be a bug in which if you drag and drop a tab on an empty space it just goes to the end of the stack every time. As I have hundreds of tabs it's a huge inconvenience to drag a single tab aaaaaaaaallllllllll the way up to where it belongs, so I end up just copying its address, closing the tab, clicking on the tab where I wanted to move it, opening a new tab next to it, and pasting the address.
By default, with vertical tabs, stacks are displayed as a second sidebar which wastes a lot of horizontal space and makes the tab titles hard to read. If you do want tab stacks, you can change "Tab Stacking" to "Compact" or "Accordion" and that will get rid of the second sidebar. Although I don't use them, I think accordion would be the best setting for vertical tabs.
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