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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?
Why in hell are we going back to 2D windows? Hell, we just go to the point where they were looking decent, and now everyone's going back to that ugly flat-ass look of the 90's?
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Given that I don't like bloat, no, Vivaldi holds no interest for me. I don't need a swiss army knife to browse the web. I need a stable, fast web browser with support for my chosen extensions.
You like the "infantile interface they refer to. I want control of my browser, Safari gives none, Firefox gives little, so I'm downloading VIvaldi and giving it test run.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Ironically it's the swiss-army-knife gecko-based Seamonkey that's less bloated and faster than 'fast & lightweight' Firefox nowadays.
Exactly, I like a browser that gets outta the way and lets me browse the web. If even an infant can grok your UI, you did a pretty dang good job.
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).
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.
Don't say that. He might hear you.
One thing that Mozilla doesn't get (and engineers in general, I ween) is that changing things imposes a cognitive load on the users.
I'm used to Firefox, it does what I want and doesn't require my attention very much. The major reason I don't switch to Chrome or any of the other browsers is cognitive load: I'd have to learn an entire new way of doing things. Different looks, different icons, different behaviour... it would take hours to figure out the new system, many minor "how can I get it to do this..." moments amortized over the next year.
Every time Firefox changes, it's a distraction. Something to notice, figure out, and get around. For me this time it's the offline cache system - no amount of fiddling with the options or about:config will cause the system to save tabs on program exit and load those tabs anew on start - the weather *has* to show yesterday's page on program startup(*).
The previous issue (for me) was putting the window rendering in an external thread, the upshot was that cascading menus took several seconds to render. Click, count to three, then see the bookmarks... move the cursor, count to three, see the selection bar move down. Setting the about:config option to undo this caused Firefox to crash on every boot, but un-setting "use hardware acceleration" fixed that. (My dad is *totally* going to figure that out and not move to Chrome instead.)
All this "OMGWTF we need to be like Chrome!!!" and "OMGWTF we need a chicklet interface" is driving users away from the system. For every change, a number of users say "screw it, I'm moving to $OtherBrowser".
Changing behaviour at all is stupid, doing it once a month is ridiculously stupid. They're thinking in terms of "how can we add more functionality" instead of "how can we attract and keep users".
Pro tip: adding complexity to every little feature does not necessarily make your software more popular.
(*) To be fair, I've only tried 6 of the 64 possible combinations of options that might affect this (in Options->Privacy and about:config). It might be a simple fix, I just need to uncover the right combination of options to do it.
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.
Take a look at these low color icon beauties.
The art professors I am sure who teach this UI stuff to future designers are drooling already.
Hey it beats adding leather to the addressbook in skuemorphic design right? You all whined and complained. Well you got it.
http://saveie6.com/
It's not just eye-candy, 3D effects can convey info. For example, having buttons look 3D helps to visually distinguish them from other boxy things. Same with tabs that cast shadows. Such cues are generally good (if done right).
Why not give people a choice in the OS? Have "flat", "3D", and maybe "Jewel" for those who really do want eye-candy.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
The obvious rebuttal is that features should be moved into official extensions. There is NO REASON WHATOSEVER why default Firefox should have debugging tools. The whole goddamn point of Firefox is that it is a platform, there should be no benefit to building any functionality in as opposed to adding it as an extension.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The whole reason Firefox exists is because a group broke off and built it to remove the feature bloat in Mozilla/Netscape.
Officially-built/supported plugins would be the ideal way to solve this. Use internal devs who know the app inside and out, but serve it as an optional extension rather than an always-available feature requiring more memory to keep running.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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
Hyperom.com
... and one has already been done:
https://vivaldi.net/forum/all/...
Content blocking is included as native. AdBlock can be added as an extension:
https://vivaldi.net/forum/viva...
You like the "infantile interface they refer to. I want control of my browser, Safari gives none, Firefox gives little, so I'm downloading VIvaldi and giving it test run.
What kind of control are you looking for that Firefox doesn't give you? I am genuinely curious.
What things do you need to do that you can't do with, for example, Chrome?
Love sees no species.
Opera was the browser with features...but then they kept adding features for no reason other than to add features. Does a web browser really need an IRC client? An integrated bittorrent client? They just went nuts adding crap, evidently because they were bored.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The whole reason Firefox exists is because a group broke off and built it to remove the feature bloat in Mozilla/Netscape.
The 'feature bloat' that they removed was sharing a XUL / XPCOM runtime with the mail client and other apps. If you only ran the web browser, Firefox was lighter, but if you also used the mail client then Firefox and Thunderbird were heavier between them than the old Mozilla suite. The main reason that I switched back in the day was that the browser was very crashy and I'd lose in-progress emails when the browser crashed: moving the mail client to a separate process fixed this.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Desired feature for any browser, failing that a plugin: Something that really restricts the information the browser sends to the server, to prevent fingerprinting. There are UI switchers and the like, but I have yet to find one that just bloody stops the browser from sending identifying information.
A website that isn't trying to be bleeding edge has no need to know my OS, my browser version, what plugins I have installed, what fonts are on my system, or indeed anything at all about my system and setup. Send me standards-compliant HTML and CSS, and let my browser worry about the representation.
It seems to me that this should be a standard setting, right next to "prohibit 3rd party cookies". Why isn't it available in (afaik) any browser at all?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.