Hands-On With the Vivaldi Browser

justthinkit writes: Vivaldi is billing itself as the power user's browser, and Ars went hands-on with it today. They say, "Vivaldi has so many great features, but it can be a little frustrating because it is still very much a technical preview. It's been largely stable during testing (most of the bugs we encountered using the first release are gone in the second), but it's still missing some key features." It appears to have the cred, with Vivaldi's CEO being Jon S. von Tetzchner, the co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Does the thinking behind Vivaldi appeal to you? Do you plan to switch when it's more feature-complete?

Comments

Re:Looks like Windows 3

[mrchaotica]

You do realize that by calling Windows 3.x "flat" you've lost all credibility, right? The '90s were the heyday of the "beveled" fake-3D look!

Opera 10.10 for 90% of my browsing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 10.10 still does very well.. Now that various large sites have stopped trying to sabotage opera directly, ebay, amazon, others work better than they ever have...

I'm a heavy user tho. I often have 40+ tabs open in a system with less than 4gb ram; as well as other applications... Chrome and Firefox I run in a VM when needed for sites that fail in Opera(Walmart! Lowes, Homedepot)...

The best features of opera few talk about are actually "Site Preferences", Content blocking, and more detailed control. I can disable or enable javascript/animations/whatever on a site by site choice... Does Vivaldi provide this?
Side by side opera uses a tiny fraction of the system resources per-page than chrome/firefox..(firefox v3.6 uses about twice that of opera 10.10, newer version are all much worse(to display/do the same thing I might add).

Here I iz

[Ol Olsoc]

Okay, I've downloaded and installed Vivaldi, and am taking it for a test drive.

Initial thoughts. Faster than Safari. Incredibly faster than Firefox, which has become like the retired Athlete that put on 100 pounds in 3 months and can't keep up.

Lets you see what cookies are placed on your machine.

Nice Keyboard Shortcuts Youtube runs well, the browser does a weird expanding thing when going to full screen, but works fine once there (it's no slower to get there, so it was just a surprise, not a knock. Configurable tabs

They have a "mail" sidebar. Not certain if web or standard - not implemented yet.

Notes are kinda cool

Things needed:

Cache location and ability to set size needed, plus ability to run with no cache.

I want to know the high persistence cookies and where they get stored, plus the ability to dump and/or refuse them.

This was all with a 15 minute tour. I'm posting using Vivaldi at the moment. It's definitely in preview form, but pretty interesting.

Re:Not even slightly interested

[wile_e_wonka]

The problem is that "your chosen extensions" can cause worse bloat than an unused feature in a browser. I'd rather have as much functionality as I can from the developer of the browser itself. Extensions are helpful (particularly for obscure features that no browser developer would bother writing because the user base would be too small) but all to often they break more than they fix.

Basically, the Vivaldi browser is designed to appeal to people who miss Opera 12.x. When Opera moved to Chromium in version 15, it did basically what you are talking about--stripped out nearly every feature aside from browsing itself and it opened up to Chrome extensions. But, many of us found that, in order to add extensions to Opera 15 and later, that met the features we used from 12.x, the browser was a hulking mess--and the extensions for the most part don't work as well as the built in functionality from 12.x. And the whole thing was now slower and riddled with memory leaks due to the extensions.

So, basically, I'm not going to suggest that you must switch to Vivaldi, but personally, I am keeping my eye on the project. I think there is a good user base to be had out there for it.

Re:Not even slightly interested

[Gaygirlie]

I dunno about bloat, but after reading through the article I just don't see anything I'd need. I never liked mouse gestures, for example, and I don't need more keyboard shortcuts, I mostly just use ctrl+n, ctrl+w, ctrl+r and ctrl+s in Firefox and that's it. I also have no need to insert notes into websites or have an integrated e-mail client; I have separate programs for that if/when I need it. It just doesn't seem to offer anything for me.

With unencrypted passwords? :)

[saikou]

I mean yes, it's a browser for "friends", and friends won't try to steal each other's password, but would it kill them to actually encrypt locally stored credentials?

~/.config/vivaldi/Default/Login Data

Plain text for such storage is kinda silly.

https://vivaldi.net/forum/private-browsing/1405-passwords-are-unencrypted
https://github.com/mortenoir/vivaldi-stealer

Vivaldi is likely to be skinnable...

[UpnAtom]

... and one has already been done:

https://vivaldi.net/forum/all/...

Yes AdBlock

[UpnAtom]

Content blocking is included as native. AdBlock can be added as an extension:

https://vivaldi.net/forum/viva...