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Opera Founder Opens Up About New Vivaldi Browser (networkworld.com)
alphadogg writes: Since the days of Mosaic in the early 1990s, Jon von Tetzchner has been working on web browsers. He is one of the creators of Opera, the alternative browser that's been a power-user favorite since 1995. His new project, Vivaldi, is heading for its first stable release. Network World sat down with von Tetzchner on Thursday to talk about Vivaldi and Opera at the Innovation House, a related venture of his.
by frequent maker Bennet Hasselton?
Do you suffer from COPD? Talk to your doctor about Vivaldi.
Vivaldi is not for everyone. Blood tests may be required while taking Vivaldi. Side effects include blurred vision, headaches, insomnia, and compulsively reading Slashdot.
I'm holding out for Quadraphenia
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Isn't North Korea buying Opera?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Is it going to look like chrome or edge?
It really is ok if every browser doesn't look exactly like every other browser.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I've been using Vivaldi for a while now. Its UI isn't as nice as Opera's (I mean the real Opera, not the shitty recent releases) was, but it's a lot more usable than Firefox's or Chrome's or Edge's or new Opera's UIs are.
There's a real status bar. You can put the tabs on any side. It can easily show the full URL. The preferences dialog is well organized and allows for a lot of customization. I haven't had problems using major Chrome extensions with it. It's reasonably fast.
Despite being so new, it kicks the living shit out of Firefox, as far as I'm concerned!
Vivaldi is a browser that empowers me, and lets me define the web experience that I want. It's not made by snotfaced hipster's pushing their "opinionated", and totally wrong, ideas on me without my consent. Firefox is a browser that shits in my mouth and makes me swallow, even when I've told them repeatedly I don't want to do that. I trust Vivaldi a lot more than I trust Chrome, too.
My only complaint about Vivaldi is that it isn't open source. But I can overlook that because it's so much better than Firefox, and it's better than Chrome and Edge, too.
Vivaldi is the first positive thing that has happened to the web in a very, very long time.
Has a few tricks up its sleeve, try it out.
Seems like your Firefox has picked up some malware during your visits to the nether regions of the Internet. ;)
As for Vivaldi, I'm one who regularly tries it out (it's one of my secondary browsers). I wouldn't go as far as you about Vivaldi's quality, and I certainly don't believe it "shits" on Firefox (at least not to that extent), but I do think it's improved since every snapshot and is on the verge of being a serious contender. I like it and hope it offers a choice away from browsers that are aimed away from the power user.
Have you tried Pale Moon? It was forked from Firefox before FF went all to hell.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Funnily enough, I typed that reply with Pale Moon. I've been trying it out for the last two weeks and am fairly impressed with it. Still, I'll probably go back to using Firefox as my main browser, but Vivaldi and Pale Moon are there if I do choose to move away.
I'm finding the direction that Firefox is taking is trying my patience, and as a long time user of Firefox since its Phoenix days, there might come a day when I say bye. Vivaldi and Pale Moon might well make that bye easier.
I want to use Pale Moon but any time I try to there is no OS X build available!
It can load 10x the pages/tabs for the same resources as 1 in 'current' browsers.
Some sites just don't work in the old Opera v10.10 however..
If a new browser is more efficient and has features ALL others seem to lack, I'd like to give it a try.. .. again this is per site; default/unknown pages get no scripting from me etc.
Site specific controls to enable disable
Javascript, contentblocking, cookies, animation,sound, other plug-ins, frames, custom styles
One of the most missed features from oldpera is the links page. So, you'd find a page with a bunch of links to files you want, you'd press ctrl+shift+l, filter by file extension and it would let you download them at once. It was like the downthemall! extension for Firefox, but much more powerful. I wonder if they even remember they had that feature.
Enforces behaviour expected by windows users, highlight search and url field on click, uses spaces in directory names for go sake with unnecessary capitalization, thinks unix clipboard was retired years ago. Not holding out much hope but it may be the only xul platform very soon.
Have you tried Pale Moon?
Stupid fucking gay-ass retarded idiotic shitty name. Won't even consider it for a nanosecond.
Every release of firefox, I hope again that they have fixed the memory leaks. They never have. I have to shut firefox down every day and run the OS X developer application "purge" to get my memory back so other programs don't stall like republicans in congress. FF is the only program that requires this. I've gone so far as to take a machine with a fresh OS install and then add FF... and it always acts the same - eats RAM like starving locusts at a newly discovered wheatfield. Lots of people have made suggestions, including one wag-er who told me "8 GB isn't enough"(! ... I typically run with about 4 GB free if FF isn't chewing on my bits.)
When I run purge, I can see memory consumption drop by 4 gigs (!) that FF has chewed to shreds; I end up with my other apps still using what they usually use, I can start FF again, and by about 8 hours later... time to kill it and purge again.
I have over-ridden cache management and set it to 10 MB; but it seems nothing helps except killing FF.
On top of that, tabs hang and consume 100% CPU, scrolling is jerky and unreliable, and when I open new tabs, the others freeze and unfreeze several times. On 3 GHz, 8-core, 8 GB machines. Which is absurd.
The bad news is that Safari has even worse problems.
Everyone wants to rush into the future. Microsoft, Apple, the FF people... pretty much everybody. I wish they'd stop trying to add features and just FIX WHAT THEY ALREADY HAVE.
Best browser I ever used? Omniweb. By miles and miles.
Unfortunately, Omniweb's developers succumbed to Apple's "New! Shiny! Incompatible!" mantra and hooked into OS X features that are only in late versions of the OS, so it's unusable under the more functional versions of OS X (no busted "appNap", no "sandboxing", comprehensive PPC support, etc.). I sure do miss using that browser.
Vivaldi? Sure, I'll try it. I'll try anything. I'm desperate now. I would give a lot for a browser that actually worked smoothly. I've not seen one in years, though.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's not non-intuitive at all.
Simplicity is great for two classes of users: power users who don't want to be power users of that particular segment of tech, and the broad swath of droolers out there. That's by far the largest chunk of market. Their version of productivity is "do the average thing without being bothered by anything." So for them, simplicity is productive.
Unfortunately, that leaves power users who do want, or even might need, sophisticated features, without the tools they need to be specifically productive. And it leads to the kind of brain-dead thinking that gives us "features" like hiding the URL and just showing the domain, non-standard (and broken) buttons because "oh, pretty", UI elements that migrate like addled geese, not to mention just up and disappear...
Sigh.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I am still on Opera 12.x because the one glaring thing the beta Vivaldi is missing is bookmarks than can be accessed easily. Having to click open the bookmark-sidebar, selecting the link and then having to click the sidebar close again is just not acceptable. Other than that, Vivaldi was fine in beta and I will be moving to it as soon as the bookmarks work well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Today, the only browser trying to be Opera is otter-browser.org
And I'm missing it on PC-BSD
A browser impossible to check for backdoors? Sorry, no.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
You're a shill.
"Vivaldi is a browser that empowers me, and lets me define the web experience that I want."
For fucks sake, save it for the marketing brochure.
How messed up in the head do you have to be to feel 'empowered' by a fucking browser.
I just hope for a decent extensions platform for it.
Opera extensions were atrociously done.
Equally things like Opera Unite. It was a great idea, but some decisions just made it completely non-scalable in any reasonable sense.
Equally I just hope they don't do stupid UI things like some of Opera had.
Some of the menus were backwards as hell and reeked of curse-of-knowledge-ism.
UIs that take a considerable amount of time to learn are Bad UIs. Especially when it came to a browser.
However, one of the most annoying things in Opera, the worst of them all, the middle-click scrolling. Oh dear GOD what are you even doing Opera?!
I remember it used to (and probably still does) move the mouse to the middle of the scrolling area you clicked in, which annoyed the absolute hell out of me.
I might try out Vivaldi since it seems to have matured enough.
Even if there is no decent extension system, as long as I can inject a user-script directly or indirectly (via address bar) so I can embed my own web-server based extension, then I am happy. (I do this so I can have a browser-independent store for all my bookmarks, I use a lot of browsers regularly, works well)
Your web-server based bookmarks extension sounds interesting. The cross-browser bookmark syncing I've tried in the past has been really clunky, so now I just export bookmarks every now and then to have backups, but don't keep bookmarks in sync between browsers.
The new Vivaldi browser is based on Chromium and uses its extension system so you can install extensions from the Chrome store. The most popular user-script extension is Tampermonkey but there are others such as Control Freak and NinjaKit. I actually haven't really used them much (Tampermonkey a little a few years ago) as I primarily use Firefox and Greasemonkey myself, but they should get the job done.
You should try out Vivaldi--it's pretty slick now. They have a forum where you can make suggestions. Definitely worth a shot of voicing your opinion if certain features (or weird behavior) make or break your using the browser.
Funnily enough, I typed that reply with Pale Moon. I've been trying it out for the last two weeks and am fairly impressed with it. Still, I'll probably go back to using Firefox as my main browser, but Vivaldi and Pale Moon are there if I do choose to move away.
I'm finding the direction that Firefox is taking is trying my patience, and as a long time user of Firefox since its Phoenix days, there might come a day when I say bye. Vivaldi and Pale Moon might well make that bye easier.
I've been using Pale Moon for a while now. I've used Firefox since the Firebird days but for me (and many others) Mozilla's decision to deprecate XUL-based extensions in favour of the WebExtensions API so that Firefox can be compatible with Chrome and Opera is the last straw. The WebExtensions API is much more restrictive and many popular extensions will be unworkable as a result.
There has been a a lot of negative reaction in the Mozilla forums; e.g "it's the extensions that make Firefox" and "If I wanted Chrome I'd use Chrome". But the Mozilla developers don't seem to be listening anymore.
I've found Pale Moon very good so far. Stable 64-bit builds, pre-Australis UI, all my favourite extensions work fine, sane and responsive developer community; what's not to like? Pale Moon will be a my browser of choice for the foreseeable future.
Thanks to Mozilla trying so hard to make something not Chrome like into a Chrome copy i have now moved to a browser which, while fully Chromium tries hard to be different than Chromium. Quite ironic :D