Vivaldi Hits Its First Beta (vivaldi.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Following well over 50 developer snapshots and 4 technical previews (Alpha), the new browser upstart has hit its first Beta release today. Following almost a year of work on alpha, Vivaldi is coming out with many unique features such as tab stacking and tiling, notes, and quick commands for navigating and feature use. Other features are in the works, such as sync and built-in mail client that will be introduced when they hit a more stable state. It's a refreshing take on the browser: as many others are diverging to a common design template, Vivaldi is taking a more feature-rich and customization-heavy approach. (We linked to a hands-on report about Vivaldi earlier this year, too.)

Comments

The browser wars are over

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody needs a new browser.

Re:The browser wars are over

[NotDrWho]

Yeah, but this browser is robust, and innovative, and refreshing, and exciting, and some other PR buzzwords that are supposed to make us give a flying fuck.

Re:The browser wars are over

[nmb3000]

Especially not one that looks like the UI was designed with MS Paint. Seriously... this is what passes for a modern and aesthetically pleasing application these days?

The Notes feature sounds marginally useful, but that's already in Firefox via one of a dozen addons. Actually, all of their "killer features" exist already or could easily be implemented as addons for Firefox. Remind me again why I should change to an ugly Chromium clone without advertising or script blocking features?

Don't get me wrong -- Firefox is going to hell too, but it seems to be running a slightly slower race than other browsers. I'm not going to switch to a front-runner.

Re:The browser wars are over

[KGIII]

Just load the unpacked Opera or Chrome/Chromium extensions of your choice. The extensions that I've tried have all worked.

Huh?

[jbmartin6]

"diverging to a common design template" does not compute

Re:Where are the trumpeting unicorns?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Me too. My notes on Mac:
- Bing is default search engine.
- The colored bar at the top changes from red to orange to blue to ??? (who wrote this, the Melnorme?)
- Videos loaded and ran automatically (Booooo!)
- Asked to use my Chrome Keychain upon connect.
- Integrates with Google Phishing/Malware and Safe Browsing interfaces
- Do not track is off by default
- There's some kind of "Vivaldi Mail" sidebar ("coming soon") - do not want
- There's some kind of notetaking facility (independent of current page) built in - for what purpose I do not know
- The bookmarks were prepopulated with US-based (and New York / San Francisco centric) items

Dear world ...

[gstoddart]

Other features are in the works, such as sync and built-in mail client that will be introduced when they hit a more stable state

Can we have a browser which is, you know, just a browser?

We don't want social integrations, we don't want cross device linking, we don't need an emailclient, a chat client, something to manage our contacts, sidebars, or any of a dozen features we just turn off an ignore.

We want a browser, small, lean, standards compliant, not a memory pig, and which respects our privacy.

Stop trying to make some do-everything turd which wants to be the center of our freaking lives. We don't need another one of those.

Do one thing, a web browser, that's it.

kthanksbye

Re:Where are the trumpeting unicorns?

[war4peace]

Adding the following:
- Huge memory footprint, on par with Chrome. This is the #1 issue I have with most modern browsers and Chrome is by far the worst offender. I understand RAM is fairly cheap, but fuck, 2 GB RAM occupied with 4 tabs (GMail, Forge of Empires, Google.com main page and Slashdot) achieves full retard status.
- Bookmark import works, but creates a sub-folder in the Bookmarks Bar / Imported Bookmarks rather than the expected behavior of asking whether prepopulated bookmarks should be replaced.
- You can't move multiple bookmark folders to the bookmark bar although you can select multiple folders (it only moves them one by one).