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.

Comments

Why the email client overhead in a browser?

[QuietLagoon]

I see that Vivaldi will get an embedded email client. Why bloat a browser with an email client? The Opera email client never really fit my needs, it was too weird how it handled emails.

.
Since the early days of Netscape, I never saw the logic behind bundling email clients with browsers.

Tired it a few weeks ago

[future assassin]

the Linux version and can't get pas the flat fugly GUI.

Re:Tired it a few weeks ago

[Billly Gates]

Whether we like it or not Flat and minimalism is in as gradients and skuemorphism where objects and icons look like objects are very outdated to the millennials today and the art professors who teach this stuff to students.

Vivaldi didn't have much of a choice as this crowd would shun anything with gradients, 3d icons, and colors.

Re:Tired it a few weeks ago

[aliquis]

Go with the standard:
http://www.file-extensions.org...
http://xwinman.org/screenshots...
http://xwinman.org/screenshots...
http://xwinman.org/screenshots...

Re:Tired it a few weeks ago

[theArtificial]

Julie Larsen-Green is totally a millennial. She's responsible for Metro and is in her 50s. When you start misattributing things to the youth you sound old and misinformed.

Re:Tired it a few weeks ago

[aliquis]

Absurd?
No. The ones I know which worked just fine.

I used MUI + MagicWB because it's an improvement over AmigaOS Workbench but still about the same. Afterstep because Next, NextStep, Steve Jobs and that it was a decent UI. I guess BeOS and OS/2 could had been thrown in too:
http://lowendmac.com/wp-conten...
http://ps-2.kev009.com/michaln...
CDE because it's the standard(?) or was on Solaris machines(?), I don't know what it replaced if anything.
FVWM is very configurable so I don't know if any of the looks are standard but it's old, known and look typical enough.

All those in total are six different examples of user-interfaces I think look pretty decent. They are all "complete different" which was kinda a joke with saying "the standard" but on the other hand looking at them like this they kinda all is very similar with highlightened and shaded buttons to give them a 3D feel / separate them, and lines and grey. Maybe it's not the best user-interface but it's very clear were everything is.

Like now I use Chrome but if I minimize this window then Steam sit behinds with it's completely own user-interface with much smaller buttons so I can't simply press on the same spot multiple times to minimize all my windows because they don't line up. How much of a crappy design isn't that?

Also the damn close button which sit in the corner of the window where if the window for whatever reason isn't fully maximized you may accidentally close some other window behind it or whatever it is which may happen. Also in Windows the close button sit together with the rest and even up until this day not all programs KNOW TO ASK WHATEVER ONE REALLY WANT TO CLOSE THEM DOWN!! Something like Chrome will just close the window / shut down and that's it. No "Do you really want to close this window with 35 tabs?" - no such thing, just close it all down!! No worries!

One the one hand I've kinda liked custom user interfaces when they are done right - like with Adobe Lightroom maybe I can accept it - I guess the difference is within whatever they live on a separate full screen themselves and have their own work-space or whatever they are windowed applications sharing the environment and space with other programs.
I guess in general I'm against non-standard user-interfaces AS LONG AS THE STANDARD IS A GOOD ONE.
Take KDE for instance - tool-bars, large tabs, vertical text written in rotated mode! Tree structures for selections here and there. I hate it. I'm ok with KDE as such but the user-interface is shit. I like that it's one environment but the user-interface used for it all isn't the best it could be IMHO.
In Windows I hate that I can't pull a drawer from explorer into a file selector dialog to enter that directory (or a file either I guess), I have to navigate through their explorer within the file selector dialog.

I don't really know how this is on topic on the user-interfaces above let alone the /. post whatever the topic was for that one - oh, Vivaldi 1.0, got it.

Oh well, back to topic then I guess:
I liked the old Opera - I like clever features and Opera was the inventor of many of them. The new Opera (and Edge) lost capabilities and I hate that. However Opera doesn't follow the native user-interface and I don't like that. I dislike tabs which somehow holds close gadgets within them which will be really cramped and when you want to switch tab you may eventually close one instead because supposedly it also held a close gadget.
So much poor design in user-interfaces. But I like the FEATURES of the good old Opera and Vivaldi.

Re:Vivalid kicks the shit out of Firefox.

[Shortguy881]

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.

Opera? For power users?

[jandersen]

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.

Re:Opera? For power users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but if you called it Wagner, after a while of using it you'd get the urge to invade Poland.

Fugly UI

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Fugly UI

[JustBoo]

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.

+1 ( I wish I had points. )

I get the whole minimalist thing, but as usual, it's been taken the the point of absurdity. I predict the next step will be a single white word on a white background with a barely visible graphic of a puff of smoke. That's it. And that will be after a year of "work" by a team of UX "geniuses." I happen to know most of that year is spent playing Clash of Clams and telling each other how smart they are to not actually provide any evidence of any actual effort and still get paid.

Only 2?

[CrashNBrn]

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.

Opera 4 years later (2012-2016)

[CrashNBrn]

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.

Re: When will Mozilla wake up?!

[jemmyw]

And yet despite its problems it runs smoother for me than chrome. With the devtools open Firefox is significantly faster. I was really surprised and only found this out when having a look at the Developer Edition of Firefox, but it is now my default browser.

Re:When will Mozilla wake up?!

[malditaenvidia]

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.

Which are these changes, by the way? Is it adjusting their interface and functionality to act and feel like chrome? Because that certainly already happened and only served to alienate their loyal userbase further. Mozilla is a non-profit organization which doesn't have Google's marketing behemoth on their side, they rely entirely on word of mouth. Google is the most visited website in the world and can afford to offer a "faster, safer browser!" to everyone visiting their page, even if we know it's complete bullshit, grandma might have no idea that chrome is a spying tool. She might not be aware of the services it runs on startup to make it seem like it's opening her facebook faster, when it's actually just always running.

So I am completely at a loss as to what Firefox and Mozilla should be doing, besides improving their browser. Maybe they should pull a netscape and sue google for monopolistic practices and whine hard enough so courts prevent google from promoting their product on their webpage.
Mozila has been comfortably stagnant for the last 10 years and just now are starting to rethink their engine and their practices. If they are to be gone then so be it, plenty of other devs will take their place as it always happens. Perhaps this will allow other free browsers to get some much needed attention.

Re:adblock option?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:One unresolved issue

[KGIII]

Go here:
chrome://settings/search#pass

Manage passwords. It's at the bottom. Click that link. Tada!