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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.
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Since the early days of Netscape, I never saw the logic behind bundling email clients with browsers.
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*
That first one is a huge issue for me. I'd be all for jumping on the Vivaldi bandwagon, but I cannot put software with no security/privacy review on my work machine, and I will not put it on my personal machine. They either need some security audits or to open source it.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
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.
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?
1) makes it a non-starter: you NEED to be using an Open Source browser at this point. So forget Vivaldi.
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.
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
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)
Wanna really get concerned about it? Open Vivaldi and do a search. It's redirecting all searches through www.vivaldi.rocks.
Open Fiddler up and you'll see all the connections and such. I just sat there with Fiddler scrolling through all the calls Vivaldi was making - it was nuts.
I used it a little in Beta, but I immediately uninstalled it.
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?
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.
It is still there and it had 7 comments when I looked.
To be vaguely on-topic in this thread: are you sure that you are using your browser correctly?
Cannot reproduce.
Perhaps that was only during beta.
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.
As far as I know, you can only install Chrome extensions in Vivaldi by typing in the internal extensions page address, enabling developer mode and then manually downloading and adding each extension.
You sure don't know much, then. Vivaldi has an Extensions page (Tools -> Extensions or Ctrl-Shift-E) which has a "Get more extensions" link to the Chrome Store. You install extensions the same way as in Chrome--browse or search the store and click on the "Add to Chrome" button for an extension you want to install. There is no going into developer mode, no manually downloading or installing anything.
The last time I tried Vivaldi, it was a crashy and buggy mess.
Cool story. Given this is the very first 1.0 release, whatever you used was Beta quality at best, as in a not-finished product. How about taking the three minutes it would take to install Vivaldi v1.0 and educate yourself? Or are you the same pathetic troll that keeps saying "Oh yes, I have recently installed [alpha quality] Servo browser and it is crap! utterly crap! and will never amount to anything!"? Vivaldi is a very usable and fast browser. It's also very flat and closed-source. But it's worth checking out if you're not completely satisfied with your current browser.
It also needs better cookie settings. It only allows you to either accept all cookies or block all. There is no way to whitelist some sites but block by default.
Huh, my version (1.0.403.24 (Beta 3)) has the same options as Chrome, namely a global setting to allow all, block all, or clear on exit; with a hostname-pattern-matching exceptions list. So it can do exactly what you say it needs.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
I've been using it for awhile now, switching over from Chrome. One of the major annoyances I have is its inability to properly move tabs to new windows -- instead, it seems to reload the entire page. This is problematic for some pages, e.g., opening a GMail email in a new window.
Not enough to stop me from using it, but pretty annoying.
While i too do not like the solution much that the Vivaldi UI is created by a bundled app, Vivaldi guys are hopeful that they can keep it alive no matter what Google team throws against them. As long as Vivaldi works, i will use it. There is much worse software existing actually.
Is Norway, Oslo the non-US format for city and state, like DD/MM/YY?
I've been using Opera since the 1990s. We had to pay for it then. I've used it since, with some exceptions... From version 15 to 23, Opera sucked. At 24 they were usable again. At 28 - 29, they were good again. They're quite nice now. I keep all three versions installed (beta, dev, stable) and use them for various tasks with separated tabs that open by default, shared settings (some), and folders that are saved on the Speed Dial.
Then again...
I've got a half dozen text browsers, Firefox (a couple of versions), all the Opera, Midori, Vivaldi (three versions), Pale Moon, Dillo, and probably a few that I've forgotten. I know I've got a couple downloaded that aren't installed yet. I'm pretty browser agnostic but I always return to Opera. I keep the others and use them for varied tasks or to test things.
I'm kind of hell bent on keeping Opera, however. That's the big thing for me. I just return to it, always. The current incarnations are very good. If you're not enjoying the current versions that is because you choose not to. They work. They work fine. They're light and responsive (for a 2016 browser). They render well. You can set it up to use any Chromium/Chrome extension, and all that sort of stuff.
It's not that I care what browser you use but if you'd actively disliking Opera that's just silly. It does its job just fine. They kind of all do, these days. Well, except for the myriad text browsers I've installed but even those serve a purpose for me. Yes, yes I do go browse the 'net with elinks or lynx. Not often - but I do. Speaking of which, I've gotta recompile Dillo so that I have https support.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Why are you still worried about not being able to see a dupe from yesterday?
They're posting this same pointless comment on every story. I don't know why they picked this article to complain about. It's a dupe from yesterday.
Geeks only wanted it until flat and minimalist was "in". I guess it's time to bring back the Fisher-Price UIs?
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
They DO have tab stacking along with their verticle tabs feature, which I tolerate... but it's truly no replacement for the unstacking method used by Tree Style Tabs in Firefox. I would rather them fold downward than pop up as big thumbnails all over the screen. They could greatly improve this feature by allowing users to turn off thumbnails in the tab stack and just having a column of plaintext showing tab names.
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.
As far as I know, you can only install Chrome extensions in Vivaldi by typing in the internal extensions page address, enabling developer mode and then manually downloading and adding each extension.
Then it was a very recent change.
This is not a recent change. The Chrome Store is just a webpage which you can visit, and which treats Vivaldi as if it were Chrome for everything I've tried. You go to it, click on an extension, and it shows the overview for it, including an "Add to Chrome" button. It's been this way since at least November, 5 months ago.
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