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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?
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Content blocking is included as native. AdBlock can be added as an extension:
https://vivaldi.net/forum/viva...