Vivaldi is developed by a team created by the former Opera founder and CEO. Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.
For those who didn't use it, Opera was first a paid browser (which limited its reach), then an ad-supported browser (which again limited its reach). It then finally became a free browser but by then it was too late.
It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its name, Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader, calendar (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration), a notes app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent client. And a TON of features and UI flexibility.
It was super compact, a marvel of engineering and UX design that managed to pack all those things in a package of about 5MB at the time, and you wouldn't even see or load the extra functionality like the email client if you didn't use it.
Unfortunately with HTML5 and the Chrome-ification of the web, it couldn't keep up :-(
Vivaldi tries to do the same on top of web techs and web techs just can't handle it. Web techs are almost as flexible but they're really slow and bulky.
Still, I wish them luck.
Oh, it's definitely recreating the experience of Opera. You encounter an annoying bug, you report it to their private bug tracker, and then they'll fix it in two years. Maybe. If you're lucky. And you don't get to know its status in the meantime. And the macOS version still feels like an afterthought sometimes.
Still better than Chrome and by far better than Safari.
Seems pretty quick, at least compared to Chromium / Firefox ;)
> you don't get to know its status in the meantime
Toward the end of Opera's life (pre v15) either an employee or a member of the community (can't remember which) did actually set up a public bug tracker tracking the status of publicly-reported bugs. It didn't show comments or anything like that: just the original bug description, report date & status. So that was... something at least.
They did also give private bug tracker access to a subset of community members, by invite.
If anyone asks, I used this heavily to bypass country blocks/redirects on a per-page level and also with privoxy on some privacy invading sites.
you can in firefox settings
you can also do it in chrome with the cli parameter --proxy-server
And don’t forget its MDI interface [1] which made using all those features a joy and is still today better than all the tab implementations of modern browsers (for power users at least).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface
As an old-time classic Opera user since version 5 or so, I do use the current Opera because I find it somewhat better than Chrome (it has more built-in stuff, including mouse gestures, Whatsapp/Telegram support, etc. I hate the barebones browser+extensions model) but unfortunately it's miles behind the old Opera experience.
I have also tried Vivaldi, and while it's a worthy effort, I'm sure many people will love it and I recommend trying it, it's missing one of the Opera characteristics I valued the most: Opera had practically zero UI lag/latency, whereas Vivaldi is rather slow, as the parent post says.
I like Vivaldi for the feature set. It's rich enough for the regular power-user, but the presentation is straightforward enough that you don't feel like you need to pimp your browser like you would Emacs. I felt home with Opera, and I feel home with Vivaldi now.
Because, let's be honest, advertising sucks and anyone that thinks advertising and search belong together sucks even more.
Though, Opera tried many things in that area. There never really lost the MDI-Spirit and went with different approached than most other TDI-Implementations. Made it more useful for some, more complicated for others. So for certain specific functions they probablly were the first ones.
I'd argue that this, in combination with easy availability of pirated serials (and the actual quality of the engine, of course), contributed to Opera popularity because "why use freeware when you can use premium software (which other people supposedly even pay for) for free".
I believe this works so if I were going to release a commercial app I would make sure to put some serials on pirate sites.
Even today, if you release a new Chromium-based browser, make it paid but easily piratable it probably is going to enjoy more popularity than if you release it for free.
I used to smoothly browse the web on it using Opera Mini. It had a simulated mouse and rendered most stuff excellently.
- Jamie Zawinski
Native UIs are much faster than web UIs, for example.
But browsing traditional sites that just have a little bit of js and are mostly static still feel faster to navigate on this 8 year old browser than the most recent chrome.
Clarifying it became a freeware browser which even after the end of its life remained closed source.
>but by then it was too late
It was the third most popular browser in the pre-Chrome era after IE and Firefox.
so, technically not very different to Brave although many users are led to believe it kept the former Opera render codebase
One of the worst things to happen to the web was for Google to start pushing at a speed and scale only they could keep up with.
The web is theirs now.
edit for clarification: This was on OSX, on Windows it was OK.
Used it for almost a year as a secondary browser, no change, gave up.
But, since you can customize the UI with your own CSS (there's a hidden setting you need to enable first, in vivaldi://experiments), I put a simple `* {filter: none !important}` in there. After I did, it felt as if I bought a new computer.
The fun part? They still haven't acknowledged it. Even after I gave them the exact steps to fix it.
I tried Vivaldi last year on my computer which is about ten years old now. Vivaldi was extremely sluggish (Chrome and Firefox still run fine), I was hoping to come back to it once I upgrade my computer.
I'm not even a big fan of the original Opera, but love Vivaldi's features such as easy screen splitting between two tabs and one-click actions to disable images or apply certain filters to a page. Picture-in-picture and pop-outs for media are also great, periodic tab reload is occasionally very useful.
Ideally I'd like to use a fully FOSS browser, but my patience with Firefox ran out, and Vivaldi is Chromium + custom open-source parts + closed-source UI layer. Good enough for me, though not ideal.
I'm skeptical of trusting Vivaldi Sync with my passwords, so that's turned off, but I use Vivaldi on my Linux desktop and Android phone, syncing bookmarks, notes, speed dials. Works great!
It's also hackable in the sense that the browser chrome uses plain old HTML/JS/CSS, so you could literally dive into `/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css` and change the way the browser looks (may have to re-patch after every browser update).
I remember having some kind of flag on pacman, back when I was using Arch, to do that automagically.
We've had tabs, tiles, tabs of tiled grids, grids of tabbed groups, floating tab groups of grid layouts, etc. for a long time. It's interesting to watch apps re-invent these window managers in different ways.
That being said, according to their blog, browser users aren't tracked or profiled by Vivaldi.
They claim to make money from search engine partner deals and from bookmark partner deals. And to be honest, I have no reason to think that the statement isn't true.
Vivaldi is based on Chromium and has lots of improvements over Chrome, like gestures out of the box, side panels, lots of clear options. And Chrome extensions work perfectly. I've had no issues so far.
The complexity of managing a browser engine that does what everyone expects requires humongous resources so I can understand the move to Chromium. As long as the google bits are removed and the extensions work, it's great to have an alternative to Edge and Chrome.
I mostly use Firefox as my daily browser and nothing would make me abandon it but it's nice to be able to segregate your various professional/private persona using different browsers.
Last time was a couple of years ago and I had some trouble between instances but maybe I didn't do it right.
Ungoogled-Chromium is what I use when I want to use a feature in Chromium Devtools that isn't available in FF, or when I just beed to test my site in Blink.
For me, the killer feature is built-in no-nonsense vertical tabs, something I had in Galeon many years ago because it used the Gtk+ tab widget. I hate hate hate that Chromium cannot do this, because dogma.
I looked up MS Edge's implementation, it seems it only shows the tabs either on top or on the left of the window, with Vivaldi you can set it at any edge of the window, I have mine on the right side.
Just don't tell them I told you ...
Meaning search over within browser window i.e. “Find in Page”?
Unfortunately I get a massive delay when fullscreening youtube videos in Vivaldi. The video first maximizes to the left half of my screen, and only then expands to the whole thing. Sadly a dealbreaker. FWIW its a little faster if I have the browser already maximized.
Since as early as October 2020 on testing [1] and as early as January 2021 on stable [2].
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/vertical-tab...
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-r...
I miss the little search bar for tabs that Vivaldi shows in the vertical tabs view.
And there was me hoping for Exchange-Sync support for Microsoft 365 email integration, to release the local reliance on Outlook 365 which gets worse with every revision :(
Once you've experienced all three working seamlessly on a mobile phone against Exchange (Online or on-prem) you realise how fragmented other 'Mail' sync systems are.
Unfortunately my org does not publish exchange as IMAP either.
- Installing and upgrading was a pain on Linux, and compiling was even worse. At first there were no AppImage for it. Then they were created but at first they were half-broken (the whole process of creating an AppImage is hacky and Qt projects were especially hard). It seems the AppImage broke again in 2018.
- The web engine comes from Qt. IIRC, it's an old fork of webkit. Many sites were not compatible, and I suspect the situation goes worse with every year.
I recommend trying Otter, but don't expect it to replace your everyday browser.
Browsing the source code, I love the author's habit to make a code commit every single day [0]. That looks like a powerful way to move the project forward while avoiding fatigue.
https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser/commits/170f36...
The formulations try really hard not to say "trust us with your data instead of big tech", which seems like an attempt to hide the fact that they do have access to everything you translate, much like Google would have... The only question is who you trust more - Vivaldi or Google?
Who do you trust less with your most personal data - Vivaldi or Google? I think the answer is pretty easy.
It's just that, if you're the average person, you're already being spied upon massively by Google and you're trying to figure out if a company orders of magnitude smaller is a credible threat to your data.
1. It's a beta product.
2. It's free.
3. They support IMAP/POP3 so you can make do with that for now.
There's honestly very little value in yet another IMAP client. Fixing a little bit the broken ecosystems around Exchange would be a million times more useful to the world.
I am glad to see that some love given to RSS in a browser since it's been marginalized in all mainstream browsers. It's frustrating to see a refuge of decentralized media consumption be thrown away considering privacy concerns.
I am not the biggest fan of the licensing policy along with the inclusion of a third party translating service but I welcome any competition to the market.
(1) it touches Vivaldi server on startup.
(2) "Google Service DNS to help resolve navigational errors" equals https://medium.com/cloud-security/google-chrome-dns-security...
Especially everything tabs feels awful. From new tab, to drag-and-drop.
how much spyware is in their browser? is it fully open sourced?
I believe the source is online but not licensed under a free license (Someone is free to correct me on that).
Last line on the page: "Before using Vivaldi Webmail and the blogging platform, we’ll ask you to verify your phone number. That’s it."
But it's being developed by a very small community, and probably can't keep up, haven't tried it in a while.
It used to feel quite slow with too many open tabs when I started using it, and would improve by hibernating them every now and then (which is built-in functionality). It seems to have improved significantly with recent releases, haven't had to hibernate tabs for quite some time now.
I didn't experience any slowdown, but not being able to drag and drop files from downloads is a pain in the ass. It's been brought up on the forums and left at that years ago.
Gonna keep using Brave...
(...)we offer Vivaldi Translate, a built-in, privacy-friendly translation feature, powered by Lingvanex and hosted by Vivaldi, keeping translations out of the reach of companies like Google or Microsoft.
Now I'm supposed to trust Vivaldi instead of Google or MS... Stopped reading right there.
I tried to use built in mail and calendar, but unfortunately my (work) life is too dependent on the little integrationa of Google calendar and gmail
