Opera's Ex-CEO Launches Vivaldi 1.0 For Power Users
Opera co-founder and former CEO Jon von Tetzchner on Wednesday launched the v1.0 of Vivaldi browser. Vivaldi v1.0, which is aimed at "power users", is available to download from the company's website for Windows, OS X, and Linux platforms. The Norway, Oslo company has been working on it since 2013. Vivaldi offers a range of features such as support for Chrome extension, Tab Stacks, Rewind and Fast Forward, and built-in support for custom keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures. There are plenty of other handy tools including the ability to check how much data a Web page has consumed in real time.
last time I checked, they still hadn't implemented the content blocking that Opera 12 had, did they enable that yet? i'm not using adblock, i'm manually blocking every single annoying ad... most website don't display ads anymore in my browser...
But is it fast enough to get first posts?
Wasn't the meme that the news will first happen on reddit, then forbes, then finally on slashdot?
I've been using Vivaldi for some time now and I have to say, it kicks the living shit out of Firefox. Over the same period of time I've seen Vivaldi get better and better with each release, while Firefox has somehow managed to get worse and worse! Vivaldi is fast, its UI is really usable, and it just works. Firefox, on the other hand, I still find to be slow, it includes all kinds of bundled shit I don't want (Hello and Pocket), and the UI has become impractical. Instead of focusing on fixing these problems with Firefox, we've seen Mozilla dick around with total failures like Firefox OS, Rust, and Servo.
There are only 2 things I dislike about Vivaldi:
1) It isn't fully open source, to the best of my knowledge.
2) It uses the system proxy settings, instead of allowing them to be set for the browser only. I only want my web browsers to go through my ad/malware-filtering SOCKS5 proxy, but Vivaldi makes this difficult.
.
Since the early days of Netscape, I never saw the logic behind bundling email clients with browsers.
"An error occurred.
Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser"
is about the first thing I see on this page. That's why I know this isn't a browser for me. Mr. von Tetzchner, you can keep this one to yourself.
Zawinski's Law
the Linux version and can't get pas the flat fugly GUI.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I'm very glad Vivaldi exists. After Opera 12, they stripped all the features that made opera useful and even experimental. What made Opera special for me is, for me, it got 9 / 10 features correct without needing plugins. Just download and go. After Opera 12, Opera basically became Chrome. I don't know why the world needs Opera to be a 2nd versions of Chrome, but that is the direction Opera took. To be fair, Vivaldi also uses Chrome as the back end, but it provides so much more than Chrome. So thanks Jon von Tetzchner for rebuilding a feature-full browser without the mess of having a dozen plugins you have to maintain! - Written in Vivaldi
Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to call it 'Wagner', then? Vivaldi is fairly light-footed and pleasant, whereas Wagner tends to sound like it was written for - and performed by - The Hulk on bad day.
Don't fall for LUDDITE propaganda. App Appers is the ONLY candidate who can defeat APPS in the GENERAL ELECTION.
If APPS is the LUDDITE candidate, App Appers will win the GENERAL ELECTION.
You have been APPED.
(captcha: apps)
If this is where user interfaces are going we could have stopped at the Athena Widgets in 1990 and saved ourselves a lot of trouble. If they really wanted something retro they could have used that. I concur with your observation.
Browsers are extremely complex application launchers and ecosystems thanks to HTML 5, apis, and CSS 3. Even the webcam API is a whole skype like api with compression, algorithms, and other things that are difficult to implement.
Worse, you need a large security team around the clock to fix bugs.
Chrome is here to stay. Of course 15 years ago I said the same with IE 6. IE 6 only mattered as it will always have 90% marketshare so IE 6 CSS and quirks will be with us always ... etc. :-) ... take it back we have 2 IE 6 apps at work still so yes I guess part of my prediction came true. Thankfully we have Citrix and no longer host it on the desktop like we did until the last minute during XP EOL 2 years ago.
http://saveie6.com/
The real question should be, When the hell will Mozilla wake up to the reality they're facing?!
The browser stats from March 2016 are now available, and they show that Firefox has only about 7% of the browser market. That's across all desktop and mobile platforms that they support, too.
To put that into perspective, it's about half of each of the most recent versions of desktop Chrome. It's about half of Chrome for Android. It's close to individual versions of other browsers, including IE 11, iOS Safari 9.2. It's likely below UC Browser for Android. Even Opera Mini, with about 5% of the market, isn't far behind Firefox.
Firefox is clearly facing strong competition from numerous other browsers. Now it will be facing even more competition from Vivaldi, which is a very appealing and useful browser for power users.
Yet despite this ever-increasing competition, and the ever-dwindling number of Firefox users, we don't see Mozilla making the drastic changes they should be making. We continue to see Firefox's support for multiple processes sputter. We continue to see unwanted UI changes. We don't see any significant performance improvements. We now hear that Mozilla will be switching to a Chrome-like extension model, which could very well cause severe breakage of existing extensions, and a really horrible experience for the few remaining Firefox users.
Don't waste your time telling me about Servo. I've tried it recently, and the experience was abysmal. It's nowhere near ready for testing, never mind actual usage of any sort. Try it yourself if you don't believe me. It's decades behind even Firefox, which is well behind Chrome and other browsers.
And we can't go blaming Firefox's declining market share on "mobile". As the stats show, desktop browsers are still the dominant ones. Even then, it's Mozilla's fault that they can't get Firefox for Android above 0.05% of the market.
Doesn't anyone at Mozilla see the problem with their current situation? Doesn't anyone there have the guts to stand up and say, "Something is seriously wrong here!"? Doesn't Mozilla as an organization realize that Firefox is pretty much the only product of theirs that some people still sometimes use? Doesn't Mozilla realize that once Firefox has lost its few remaining users, which based on the current trends will happen eventually, that it, as an organization, won't have any influence of the future and the direction of the web?
Why aren't we seeing more panic from Mozilla? Why do we just see more of the same old, which clearly hasn't been working, as it has been driving away their existing users without attracting any new users? Why aren't we seeing more concern from Mozilla about the future?
There's almost nothing that Vivaldi does, that Opera doesn't, except for Tab Stacks.
Unfortunately, Tab Stacks is one of the worst Tab implementations I've seen in 16 years. Opera 6 or 7 had a better Tab implementation as you could manage Windows\Tabs from the Panel. Now unless Vivaldi has pulled a rabbit out of their ass, their Panel implementation isn't anywhere near as functional as Opera 7 (from 2003).
They've also been claiming that Vivaldi was going to get an email client for about 3 years now. Hopefully no one was holding their breath.
Why should i use Vivaldi when i also can use Firefox and Classic Theme restorer?
Vivaldi is Open Source Chromium with a bundled closed source app (Want to see that is true? Open Vivaldi task manager, kill the webview Vivaldi process, and UI disappears, but browser keeps running) to create the UI which is thanks to how it is created highly exploitable.
No thanks, go away!
I've been using Vivaldi for about 6 months now. This post is made via Vivaldi. One issue I've had and could not find a solution is that of unlocking my saved passwords. In Firefox, you can press a button to see your saved password, and the browser kindly asks "are you sure?". In Vivaldi you don't even have that option. I had to use the built-in inspector to alert() me my password at form submission time since it was remembered and prefilled by the browser.
Other than that, I enjoy it. It's slightly nimbler than Firefox and not as intrusive as Chrome.
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
>the greatest president that ever presidented
This needs to make the voyage to the footer quote of the day somehow.
Then again, Opera has done little beyond bug fixing for the last year (or more). I think they got around to adding Bookmarks ~2 years ago.
Within the last year or so Opera got rid of their Browser Developers from Norway and outsourced to Devs from the Czech Republic. At that point a number of ex-Opera devs went over to Vivaldi. Since then Opera Developer has slowed to a crawl.
I stopped giving a rats ass after Opera sold itself to China.
you mean America is not great now?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Let's be real here, have you done a complete security audit of whatever browser you're using now? Have you, or even somebody else that you fully trust, checked every single line of code of the browser, plus any third-party libraries it uses? Have you built it yourself from this audited source code, to ensure that the binary you're using actually corresponds to the publicly-available source code? Have you also audited the compiler you're using, to ensure it isn't injecting code into the compiled binaries (like Thompson demonstrated is possible)?
My suspicion is that you're holding Vivaldi to a much, much higher standard than you are with Chrome, Firefox, or whatever other browser you're currently using.
"One of the things that makes Vivaldi unique is that it is built on modern web technologies. We use JavaScript and React to create the user interface..."
Uhh.
So basically they're writing Firefox on top of Blink instead of Gecko?
No tab trees. Guess I'm sticking with Firefox.
The comments for this type of articles always seem to follow the same pattern.
1. There will be more critical than supportive comments. Although for Windows that's understandable.
2. Approximately 200 ACs could have done it better although they never seem to announce when their product will be ready.
Disclaimer: actually posted using Vivaldi but I'm not really a fanatic user of any browser, having 4 installed on the machine I'm currently using.
This has been the front page story, until lately:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/04/06/1529210/nest-reminds-customers-that-ownership-isnt-what-it-used-to-be
Is slashdot applying censorship? Who are really the new overlords? Has Alphabet paid SlashdotMedia to silence its criticism?
The article's text:
Alphabet-owned Nest recently announced that it will be turning off Revolv Hub next month. An anonymous reader shares an article on EFF, a privacy rights group:
Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices -- customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of updates would enable the hardware they paid for to actually work, only to discover the manufacturer can turn their device into a useless brick when it so chooses. This is far from the first time that customers' software and electronics have been downgraded by manufacturers. Updates can disable features the customer paid for that have fallen out of favor with the vendor, as when Google disabled privacy settings on Android or Sony took away the ability to run GNU/Linux on a Playstation 3. Manufacturers can even render a device unusable until the customer "agrees" to new terms of use, as Nintendo did with the Wii U. Other software and devices, including some video games, are designed so they simply stop working when they can no longer dial home to a server run by the vendor.
TFA: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/nest-reminds-customers-ownership-isnt-what-it-used-be
Is a browser that that the geeks can have to themselves. A minimalist ui, tabbed browsing, ad filtering, script blocking and no bloatware like pocket. The makers of a Slashdot friendly browser would be given lots of bitcoin. And no Pale Moon or Uzbul aren't it.
so no thank you. firefox wins, hands down. adblock+noscript
This reminds me of the Avant browser of some 10-15 years ago. That was basically an embedded IE frame with a super clunky custom UI around it. Sure, it enabled tabbed browsing and some other nifty things to IE at the time, but the overall user experience was clunky as fuck.
The same is true of Vivaldi. It is just another Webkit based browser (think Chrome, Opera, and Safari), but with yet another clunky UI surrounding it. The browser may support some cool new experimental features, but the rendering pipeline is extremely slow. To get an idea of this, try resizing the window and watch it flicker in and out of place. Whereas Chrome has very nice per-OS rendering optimizations, Vivaldi seems to be fighting with OS UI API rendering calls constantly, slowing it down considerably. This may not be an issue for higher end systems that can spare the CPU/GPU cycles, but on leaner machines for casual browsing, it is a major pain.
It STILL cannot open more than 20 bookmarks at the same time. This has been an ongoing issue for a long time now in the beta and still is in the final 1.0 release.
Is Norway, Oslo the non-US format for city and state, like DD/MM/YY?
The reason I liked Opera was because it allowed a rich browsing experience with great degree of costumisability and control natively, without needing to install 20 shitty javascript extensions that make a browser slow and unstable. A browser written entirely in shitty js is not a replacement for Opera.
How do you toggle javascript on/off? How do you toggle style sheets on/off? How do you disable positioning?
Fuck you, Vivaldi.
See subject: You think like I do, & know how great Opera 12.x & below truly was... massively flexible + powerful. I don't want or need ANYTHING less, & if this is the case with this new browser (the guy coding it's really good imo, no questions asked, but he's probably forced by ''market pressure" or sponsorship to NOT disallow the bringer of all evil, or one of them like JAVA + FLASH too, in javascript - minus scripting, which brings more bs infestation than ANYTHING else (which you THINK they would've learned from MS in Word/Excel/Access Macros beforehand that once you script a document? The trash WILL eventually come blowing in... I was a much bigger fan of server-side CGI/WinCGI because of it, less danger that way)).
* Besides - I still use Opera 12.18 (newest release & pretty recent patch too if you didn't know that) - it works even to this day, excellently, on all levels noted above. Boggles my MIND that he 'abandoned' it. It still is, the best, hands-down.
APK
P.S.=> Thanks for the "heads up", assuming you're correct & I am guessing you are being honest about your findings - I'll pass for now because of your statements (unless someone corrects you or has already while I wrote this etc.)... apk
Granted, that chart you linked was garbage since it explained little, but had you gone through and clicked on who they got their stats from you will find what you quoted to be very off the mark.
Site: http://gs.statcounter.com/
Firefox has been dropping, but very slowly and it's still pretty consistent at around 15% or so of the market, Most of Chrome's growth has been at the hands of other browsers, I.E. in particular. The odds of Vivaldi making a significant dent in Firefox is small, it's more likely to cannibalize Chrome and everyone else.
And Mozilla is concerned, and they should be. Personally, I think they should have fired several developers YEARS ago. The growing number of forks, 64bit and UI, should have been good indications they were doing something wrong. Which leads back to Chrome as well, yes, Chrome is growing, however, some of that could also be forks, since there is enough of them, but why are there so many? I have yet to see a Chrome fork that actually makes things any better.
If it doesn't support them, it has nothing to do with "power users" IMHO.
Not only email, but the linux version *DEMANDS* "cups", i.e printer support. My current Gentoo setup already has Pale Moon and Opera 12.16 installed, and any dependancies they require. Installing Vivaldi would download 83,318 KiB of files, of which 43,955 KiB is actually Vivaldi. The rest would be...
net-dns/libidn-1.30
sys-libs/libcap-2.24-r2
dev-libs/dbus-glib-0.102
app-text/qpdf-5.1.1
dev-libs/libtasn1-4.5
dev-libs/nettle-3.2
dev-scheme/guile-1.8.8-r1
sys-devel/autogen-5.18.4
net-libs/gnutls-3.3.17.1
app-text/poppler-0.32.0
gnome-base/gconf-3.2.6-r4
net-print/cups-2.0.3
net-print/cups-filters-1.5.0
qpdf and poppler seem to be for in-browser pdf-rendering. Other browsers allow me to pass pdf files to "helper applications", like mupdf. Screw this noise.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
After ousting Brendan Eich they should have made a rainbow theme and target LGBT - the usage numbers would have soared. Honestly, an organization that did not unite behind and support their CEO in such circumstances deserves all it gets.