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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.
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.
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/
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...