Vivaldi Browser Segfault

The other day I wanted to start my Vivaldi web browser. But the only thing I got was a error message:

kernel: vivaldi-bin[2017]: segfault at 288 ip 000055575d16ee58 sp 00007ffc1a539300
error 4 in vivaldi-bin[555759471000+6890000]

Aha… “Very good”. The only thing I did a day before was upgrading Vivaldi but only a bugfix release. Googling around didn’t help very much. At least I now knew that I was not the only one with this problem. Often the suggestion was to delete the profile which basically means to delete $HOME/.config/vivaldi/Default directory (if you use Linux and using the Default profile). That wasn’t an option as I had a LOT of tabs open that I didn’t wanted to loose.

I first made a copy of $HOME/.config/vivaldi/Default directory and then deleted it. Vivaldi started again but with a new default profile of course. But at least it was clear now that something in the profile caused the problem. So I decided to delete file by file or directory by directory, start Vivaldi and checked if it works again. If not copy the whole profile directory back from the backup and deleted the next file or directory.

Finally deleting the file $HOME/.config/vivaldi/Default/Preferences did the trick. Vivaldi started again. I at least got a few settings back like the theme I had used but others I needed to set again like cookie settings. Lucky me I used the extension Session Buddy. This extension saves the state of all tabs and also all open Vivaldi windows. So as I lost my preferences I simply installed the extension again and got all my tabs and windows back :D!

As segmentation faults seem to occur from time to time with Vivaldi browser during startup using the Session Buddy extension is basically a must if you have a lot of tabs and windows open!

Besides that if secure browsing is what you want I at least recommend uMatrix and uBlock Origin extensions.