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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.
A tech company from China.
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.
Opera originally had it's own web engine "Presto", but that changed after version 12. They migrated to Chromium which had webkit, and now blink. Kind of a shame too because Presto was a good engine for most sites, and one of the best (if not the best) in regards to web standards at the time.
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