Vivaldi 4.0

by 0x49d1 • 5 years ago

469 280 5 years ago

oblio6• 5 years ago

Vivaldi Mail? That took a while :-D

Vivaldi is developed by a team created by the former Opera founder and CEO. Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.

For those who didn't use it, Opera was first a paid browser (which limited its reach), then an ad-supported browser (which again limited its reach). It then finally became a free browser but by then it was too late.

It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its name, Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader, calendar (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration), a notes app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent client. And a TON of features and UI flexibility.

It was super compact, a marvel of engineering and UX design that managed to pack all those things in a package of about 5MB at the time, and you wouldn't even see or load the extra functionality like the email client if you didn't use it.

Unfortunately with HTML5 and the Chrome-ification of the web, it couldn't keep up :-(

Vivaldi tries to do the same on top of web techs and web techs just can't handle it. Web techs are almost as flexible but they're really slow and bulky.

Still, I wish them luck.

whikhngbu359• 5 years ago

I believe Opera was the first browsers to introduce tabs.

_trampeltier• 5 years ago

Yes, years before other browsers had tabs.

thanatos5196• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure Galeon had tabs before Opera, but maybe something had tabs before Galeon.

crummy• 5 years ago

It also had mouse gestures, right click drag left to go back, right click... swirl? to reload... felt like I was casting spells!

rotten• 5 years ago

It also had a built-in pop-up blocker which none of the other browsers at the time had.

slightwinder3• 5 years ago

No, it was not. That's a popular myth, but it's wrong. There were other browser with Tabs before opera event tried them. And Operas first attempts wasn't really Tabs in the modern sense. It was just a poor working button-bar for an MDI, which was a bit cumbersome to use. They fixed it two versions later, around the time when the feature gained attention in other browsers and even Mozilla Suit got it's first Extension that became so insanly popular that it was build into Phoenix (later renamend to Firebird, then Firefox) out of the box.

Though, Opera tried many things in that area. There never really lost the MDI-Spirit and went with different approached than most other TDI-Implementations. Made it more useful for some, more complicated for others. So for certain specific functions they probablly were the first ones.

littlecranky67• 5 years ago

Loved Opera back in the day. It had "page specific settings" that would let me allow to set HTTP/Socks5 proxies on a per-page setting - today you cannot even set a proxy anymore without changing your system settings (not browser settings).

If anyone asks, I used this heavily to bypass country blocks/redirects on a per-page level and also with privoxy on some privacy invading sites.

0ld• 5 years ago

today you cannot even set a proxy anymore without changing your system settings (not browser settings).

you can in firefox settings

you can also do it in chrome with the cli parameter --proxy-server

2Gkashmiri• 5 years ago

foxyproxy does this. i set up a ssh passthrough and routed foxyproxy with only specifed pages to use local proxy which meant they would be routed through the ssh. it worked for what i wanted

mobilio• 5 years ago

I still miss Opera 12.16...

gsich• 5 years ago

Firefox has proxy settings. Socks5 is bugged though. Doesn't support user/password authentication.

nnwright• 5 years ago

And don't forget the ability to run a web server from within the browser. Opera was sometimes buggy, but it was really the first "browser as an operating system".

Siira• 5 years ago

You can do some basic routing using the domain name or the IP via an advanced proxy, such as v2ray. Shadowrocket on iOS also supports this.

marban• 5 years ago

Not to forget Opera Mini which did server-side rendering for mobiles. Results were WAP-like quality and mostly sucked (by nature of device's capabilities back then).

forty2• 5 years ago

I disagree. Opera mini allowed me to browse the web almost normally (I was using a Nokia E65) and I never really understood why I regularly see people saying the iPhone brought internet to smartphones or something of the sort.

jlelse• 5 years ago

Opera Mini is still a thing.

leokennis2• 5 years ago

Disagree. In 2007 I used a Nokia 6300 (https://i.imgur.com/5ezXN1R.png) and I had an unlimited data plan for €10/month (because, who was going to use a lot of data on 2G on a small feature phone?).

I used to smoothly browse the web on it using Opera Mini. It had a simulated mouse and rendered most stuff excellently.

howolduis• 5 years ago

it forces you to provide a phone number to use it. I'm out... too invasive

grishka9• 5 years ago

Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.

Oh, it's definitely recreating the experience of Opera. You encounter an annoying bug, you report it to their private bug tracker, and then they'll fix it in two years. Maybe. If you're lucky. And you don't get to know its status in the meantime. And the macOS version still feels like an afterthought sometimes.

Still better than Chrome and by far better than Safari.

oblio6• 5 years ago

I guess I had it good, I was using the Windows and Linux Opera versions. The Windows version was always solid.

lucideer3• 5 years ago

they'll fix it in two years

Seems pretty quick, at least compared to Chromium / Firefox ;)

you don't get to know its status in the meantime

Toward the end of Opera's life (pre v15) either an employee or a member of the community (can't remember which) did actually set up a public bug tracker tracking the status of publicly-reported bugs. It didn't show comments or anything like that: just the original bug description, report date & status. So that was... something at least.

They did also give private bug tracker access to a subset of community members, by invite.

eloisant• 5 years ago

That's because Opera (and now Vivalvi) cares more about building as many features as possible than stability or even consistency of the experience.

fyhn• 5 years ago

I dunno, I've submitted four bugs. One solved within a day, one after 20 days, and two still unresolved as far as I know. It could of course be better, I don't think it's quite like you describe.

mcintyre19942• 5 years ago

Opera had some ridiculously powerful keyboard shortcuts and performance as well for the time. I used to play this web game years ago and past beginner level the only way to compete was to use Opera because you could use a combination of keyboard shortcuts to send attacks/defences from multiple tabs within milliseconds.

muyuu• 5 years ago

it abandoned the Opera engine though, to focus on the UI experience

so, technically not very different to Brave although many users are led to believe it kept the former Opera render codebase

metalliqaz2• 5 years ago

What do you mean "on top of web techs"? Aren't all browsers web techs...??

hansel_der• 5 years ago

'modern' browsers use/incorporate a lot of the tech that is used to build web-sites(-apps). i.e. convergence of content and presentation

oblio6• 5 years ago

The Opera UI was built using Qt widgets. So native, C++ code. The Vivaldi UI is built using React, I think.

Native UIs are much faster than web UIs, for example.

Al-Khwarizmi2• 5 years ago

Just to clarify in case someone's wondering, a browser named Opera still exists and gets updated now, but neither the people behind it nor the underlying technology are the same as in the old Opera this post is referring to.

As an old-time classic Opera user since version 5 or so, I do use the current Opera because I find it somewhat better than Chrome (it has more built-in stuff, including mouse gestures, Whatsapp/Telegram support, etc. I hate the barebones browser+extensions model) but unfortunately it's miles behind the old Opera experience.

I have also tried Vivaldi, and while it's a worthy effort, I'm sure many people will love it and I recommend trying it, it's missing one of the Opera characteristics I valued the most: Opera had practically zero UI lag/latency, whereas Vivaldi is rather slow, as the parent post says.

taylodl2• 5 years ago

As someone who now uses Vivaldi as their daily driver I can vouch that it's a bit slow, especially on older hardware. Obviously it's not intolerable, but it would be nice to see some improvements in that area.

Bayart3• 5 years ago

Vivaldi is exactly as slow or fast as any Chromium-based browser. A this point I've surrendered to the notion of the web never getting faster, but just eating away any efficiency gains in computing.

I like Vivaldi for the feature set. It's rich enough for the regular power-user, but the presentation is straightforward enough that you don't feel like you need to pimp your browser like you would Emacs. I felt home with Opera, and I feel home with Vivaldi now.

krisgenre• 5 years ago

Also, during the days of Symbian OS Opera Mini was the best mobile browser available. I remember logging into my bank account and actually doing a transaction on my Nokia N73 running Opera Mini.

thunderbong3• 5 years ago

I still use Opera 12, by the way. Works fine for about 75% of the web. For the remaining, I use Vivaldi!

iforgotpassword• 5 years ago

Not my experience. I use it out of nostalgia, but only for select sites. Many sites with modern SSL config won't load. Click a random link that lands you on a js-heavy site and the browser will stutter or often crash. Which is impressive because back in the day opera once had the fastest js engine by a mile. Goes to show how far V8 has come.

But browsing traditional sites that just have a little bit of js and are mostly static still feel faster to navigate on this 8 year old browser than the most recent chrome.

pbsb• 5 years ago

Kind of off topic, but what do you mean by chrome-ification of the web?

oblio6• 5 years ago

Chrome is taking over the web and a ton of features start/are only in Chrome. Youtube had a "bug" which made it 2x slower in Firefox, for example.

55555• 5 years ago

I use a browser probably 12 hours per day. Maybe there's enough people willing to pay a dollar or two a month for that to be a possible business model again.

awful_waffle3• 5 years ago

This honestly sounds like a great idea. At this point I'd pay money for a browser that was private, fast, and dev-friendly, simply to avoid the moral dilemma of switching from FF to a Chrome clone.

0x49d12• 5 years ago

They've actually added option for donations: https://vivaldi.com/contribute/

kordlessagain• 5 years ago

If it had a decent search agent in it, without ads, I'd pay for it.

Because, let's be honest, advertising sucks and anyone that thinks advertising and search belong together sucks even more.

scroot• 5 years ago

Though I'm not sure what they are up to exactly, isn't this what The Browser Company [1] is trying to do?

[1] https://thebrowser.company/

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

Forgot to mention that China owns them, so say goodbye to data privacy.

SkyMarshal• 5 years ago

It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its name, Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader, calendar (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration), a notes app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent client. And a TON of features and UI flexibility.

And don’t forget its MDI interface [1] which made using all those features a joy and is still today better than all the tab implementations of modern browsers (for power users at least).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface

bookofsand• 5 years ago

paid => ads => free. How is a 'free browser' supposed to pay its developers?

ols2• 5 years ago

They licensed the browser for devices like set-top boxes and similar devices. There was also money coming from Google (for using it as a default search engine). I guess they had also some business model built around Opera Mini and relations with mobile providers.

pjs_• 5 years ago

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

- Jamie Zawinski

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

Opera was first a paid browser (which limited its reach)

I'd argue that this, in combination with easy availability of pirated serials (and the actual quality of the engine, of course), contributed to Opera popularity because "why use freeware when you can use premium software (which other people supposedly even pay for) for free".

I believe this works so if I were going to release a commercial app I would make sure to put some serials on pirate sites.

Even today, if you release a new Chromium-based browser, make it paid but easily piratable it probably is going to enjoy more popularity than if you release it for free.

echelon• 5 years ago

Unfortunately with HTML5 and the Chrome-ification of the web, it couldn't keep up :-(

One of the worst things to happen to the web was for Google to start pushing at a speed and scale only they could keep up with.

The web is theirs now.

drdavid• 5 years ago

The Vivaldi mail thing must have been in the works for a while. Since very early on, they offered an email address at their .net domain. It wasn't integrated or an email client, but they had that aspect setup early on.

forgotpwd16• 5 years ago

It then finally became a free browser

Clarifying it became a freeware browser which even after the end of its life remained closed source.

but by then it was too late

It was the third most popular browser in the pre-Chrome era after IE and Firefox.

Vinnl2• 5 years ago

Off-topic, but: does anyone know how Vivaldi is funded? I tried looking for it for a bit, but couldn't find any income streams.

haunter• 5 years ago

First hit in Google

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

csabakissi• 5 years ago

that link doesn't work: Error establishing a database connection

yunohn4• 5 years ago

They spoke about this business model in the release post too.

I’m just finding it really hard to believe that it’s sustainable and makes them enough money to run a team…

Vinnl2• 5 years ago

Haha, that'll teach me for thinking I can find information just by browsing through the menu items. Thanks!

asutekku• 5 years ago

They at least have some sponsored bookmarks if you don’t configure them bt yourself.

lightdot• 5 years ago

By merchadising their produc... er... users! :)

That being said, according to their blog, browser users aren't tracked or profiled by Vivaldi.

They claim to make money from search engine partner deals and from bookmark partner deals. And to be honest, I have no reason to think that the statement isn't true.

roachpepe• 5 years ago

If it's free, then you're the product. Or will eventually be, plenty of projects have started out with good intentions and a noble cause only to be ultimately bought out, userbase and all. Creating something like Vivaldi 4.0 is not cheap, someone has poured cash in - who that is, I think the end-user should be entitled to know.

nik736• 5 years ago

It's down.

smarx007• 5 years ago

HN hug :) https://web.archive.org/web/20210609074720/https://vivaldi.c...

mxcrossr• 5 years ago

I’m kind of surprised HN could take them down

throw737858• 5 years ago

I think it follows spirit of old Opera 12 very well. It is even opensource (kind of).

rplnt4• 5 years ago

For true old Opera experience there's Otter.

https://otter-browser.org/

But it's being developed by a very small community, and probably can't keep up, haven't tried it in a while.

inter_netuser• 5 years ago

website is down.

how much spyware is in their browser? is it fully open sourced?

j_koreth2• 5 years ago

I'm not aware of any spyware in the browser.

I believe the source is online but not licensed under a free license (Someone is free to correct me on that).

chucky2• 5 years ago

The browser engine, being a Chromium variant, is open-sourced. The source code for the UI is not available under an open source license it seems: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-sou...

edu• 5 years ago

It's down, archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210609074720/https://vivaldi.c...

otabdeveloper42• 5 years ago

Not going to download it just to find out that they didn't bother supporting Office365.

diveanon• 5 years ago

Don't blame them, office365 is a pain in the ass to support.

otabdeveloper42• 5 years ago

I know. That's why I wrote the comment.

There's honestly very little value in yet another IMAP client. Fixing a little bit the broken ecosystems around Exchange would be a million times more useful to the world.

oblio6• 5 years ago

Talk about entitlement.

1. It's a beta product.

2. It's free.

3. They support IMAP/POP3 so you can make do with that for now.

rplnt4• 5 years ago

I really tried to like Vivaldi, and it could be a good browser, but is so unbearably slow. The whole UI is unresponsive. Opening a new tab can take almost a second. Price for javascript apps I guess.

edit for clarification: This was on OSX, on Windows it was OK.

Used it for almost a year as a secondary browser, no change, gave up.

andai• 5 years ago

Do you have an older machine, or is it even slow on new machines?

I tried Vivaldi last year on my computer which is about ten years old now. Vivaldi was extremely sluggish (Chrome and Firefox still run fine), I was hoping to come back to it once I upgrade my computer.

rplnt4• 5 years ago

It was a relatively new hw, MB Pro 2017. No issues with other browsers.

hulitu2• 5 years ago

My experience with an 10 years old computer with win 7 is that firefox is slow and vivaldi is faster. I don't use chrome. On Android vivaldi is much faster than firefox.

zaphirplane• 5 years ago

Is it based on electron. - drum roll - :)

neolog• 5 years ago

That just means it's based on chromium, which makes sense for a browser.

atlemo• 5 years ago

No :)

kunagi73• 5 years ago

After the 3.7 release they've improved UI responsiveness quite dramatically. In my laptop (i5, 8200U), opening a new tab or settings used to take 1 to 2 seconds, but now it hovers around 250~300ms.

dartharva• 5 years ago

It is indeed bloated. Its main redeeming quality in my opinion was that it was the only chromium-based browser that allowed sideloading extensions freely, but now that's gone too since Chrome and Brave have apparently started allowing it as well.

grishka9• 5 years ago

I found a bug that slowed it down a great deal. It was the fact that they put multiple `filter` styles onto the tabs, even when those filters did nothing useful. It was still extremely taxing on the GPU driver.

But, since you can customize the UI with your own CSS (there's a hidden setting you need to enable first, in vivaldi://experiments), I put a simple `* {filter: none !important}` in there. After I did, it felt as if I bought a new computer.

The fun part? They still haven't acknowledged it. Even after I gave them the exact steps to fix it.

IlliOnato• 5 years ago

Can you give more details? I can see how to enable custom CSS, but where I go from there? Where to put the custom CSS?

dagurp3• 5 years ago

Where did you report it? I'd like to take a look.

silentbugs• 5 years ago

Which part exactly is being slowed down by these filters? Could you post a link to the bug report if it's public?

Matthias1• 5 years ago

I just did some tests and was unable to replicate your results. I'm on an i5 2019 Mac, and Vivaldi takes about 200ms to open a tab, with or without CSS filters. (200ms is bearable, but it is slower than I would like.) I have Hardware Acceleration on and Use Animation off.

globular-toast2• 5 years ago

Odd because the one thing I remember about Opera from back in the day was how fast it was. This was back when Firefox was king amongst in-the-know users but IE6 was most popular overall. Opera was so much faster and smoother than everything else.

rplnt4• 5 years ago

Opera was fast and stable, especially with more tabs open. Way into the Chrome era too. Too bad Google used it's monopoly to drive other browsers to death. Only Firefox survived really.

alichapman• 5 years ago

Anyone else getting 500s trying to access this?

bitigchi2• 5 years ago

For an open-source recreation of Opera 12, there is Otter: https://otter-browser.org

warpech3• 5 years ago

Thanks for the link!

Browsing the source code, I love the author's habit to make a code commit every single day [0]. That looks like a powerful way to move the project forward while avoiding fatigue.

https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser/commits/170f36...

idoubtit• 5 years ago

I used Otter as a second browser for some time, but, despite all my empathy from the project, a few years ago I stopped.

- Installing and upgrading was a pain on Linux, and compiling was even worse. At first there were no AppImage for it. Then they were created but at first they were half-broken (the whole process of creating an AppImage is hacky and Qt projects were especially hard). It seems the AppImage broke again in 2018.

- The web engine comes from Qt. IIRC, it's an old fork of webkit. Many sites were not compatible, and I suspect the situation goes worse with every year.

I recommend trying Otter, but don't expect it to replace your everyday browser.

bitigchi2• 5 years ago

It's in the process of switching to QtWebEngine, which is the Chromium version.

thanatos5196• 5 years ago

I'm trying Vivaldi again since as an expat I depend on single-click in-browser translation.

For me, the killer feature is built-in no-nonsense vertical tabs, something I had in Galeon many years ago because it used the Gtk+ tab widget. I hate hate hate that Chromium cannot do this, because dogma.

warpech3• 5 years ago

FWIW, Microsoft Edge also has vertical tabs.

thanatos5196• 5 years ago

Sorry, you lost me at 'Microsoft'.

bellyfullofbac• 5 years ago

Neat! I'm not the grandparent poster, but I also can't stand horizontal tabs, probably because I'm a tab hoarder. But with screens wider than they are tall, vertical tabs make sense, and each new tab doesn't truncate all other tabs' titles.

I looked up MS Edge's implementation, it seems it only shows the tabs either on top or on the left of the window, with Vivaldi you can set it at any edge of the window, I have mine on the right side.

gbrhaz• 5 years ago

Vertical tabs without the 'tree' aspect (at least when I last used Vivaldi). Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension is still the best option I've found so far.

mcintyre19942• 5 years ago

I switched from Firefox + Tree Style Tabs to Vivaldi + Tab Stacks and I mostly prefer it. The ability to tile tabs within a group is the killer feature, as well as it being much better supported by being native. Stack by host is great too. The big tradeoff is that you only get one layer of nesting, but I find it's generally worth that tradeoff for me.

j_koreth2• 5 years ago

I'm surprised it took this long for Vivaldi Mail to come out. I believe it was teased relatively early on in Vivaldi's life although I don't envy the developers that had to work with IMAP.

I am glad to see that some love given to RSS in a browser since it's been marginalized in all mainstream browsers. It's frustrating to see a refuge of decentralized media consumption be thrown away considering privacy concerns.

I am not the biggest fan of the licensing policy along with the inclusion of a third party translating service but I welcome any competition to the market.

dagurp3• 5 years ago

The translation service is hosted at Vivaldi

andris9• 5 years ago

For IMAP they seem to use emailjs-imap-client that is written by myself for Whiteout.io a long time ago. IMAP command tags are still prefixed with `W` that would stand for [W]hiteout. Nice to see my old code being useful :D

ACS_Solver• 5 years ago

I want to offer Vivaldi some praise, I switched to it as my main browser a few years ago, and it's been great. I had to look for a new browser when Firefox (that I had used since the Firebird days) kept breaking my settings and plugins with their updates. After yet another Firefox update I wasn't able to restore the browser to how I want it to be, so I tried Vivaldi.

I'm not even a big fan of the original Opera, but love Vivaldi's features such as easy screen splitting between two tabs and one-click actions to disable images or apply certain filters to a page. Picture-in-picture and pop-outs for media are also great, periodic tab reload is occasionally very useful.

Ideally I'd like to use a fully FOSS browser, but my patience with Firefox ran out, and Vivaldi is Chromium + custom open-source parts + closed-source UI layer. Good enough for me, though not ideal.

thefz• 5 years ago

To me tab tiling is invaluable. I just wish it had session syncing, that would be great. I use Vivaldi a lot.

thunderbong3• 5 years ago

Vivaldi does have session syncing.

hulitu2• 5 years ago

Also Vivaldi is faster.

alpaca128• 5 years ago

I find this statement a bit puzzling. Vivaldi is the slowest browser I've tried in recent years. The couple times I used it I always went back to Firefox after a few weeks because I couldn't stand the sluggish UI anymore. Maybe it improved by now, but I find it hard to believe it's now supposed to be faster after Firefox' massive performance updates.

kjakm• 5 years ago

I hadn't even thought of tab tiling as a feature I might need until now. Just took a look and seems incredibly useful!

Seirdy4• 5 years ago

If you want tabs and tiling in every program, you should give a tiling WM like Sway or i3 a try ;).

We've had tabs, tiles, tabs of tiled grids, grids of tabbed groups, floating tab groups of grid layouts, etc. for a long time. It's interesting to watch apps re-invent these window managers in different ways.

sirius872• 5 years ago

Same. Huge fan of Opera 12, I was active in their community sites and reported bugs when possible. I'm glad to see them all coming back.

I'm skeptical of trusting Vivaldi Sync with my passwords, so that's turned off, but I use Vivaldi on my Linux desktop and Android phone, syncing bookmarks, notes, speed dials. Works great!

It's also hackable in the sense that the browser chrome uses plain old HTML/JS/CSS, so you could literally dive into `/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css` and change the way the browser looks (may have to re-patch after every browser update).

Bayart3• 5 years ago

may have to re-patch after every browser update

I remember having some kind of flag on pacman, back when I was using Arch, to do that automagically.

amyjess• 5 years ago

Have the Vivaldi developers confirmed whether or not they'll continue supporting Manifestv2? I think I heard something along those lines but I Can't remember where.

traveler01• 5 years ago

I like Vivaldi but I do enjoy using my main browser also for web development. BUT, they do a browser for power users but couldn't care less with developers since they haven't fixed the broken responsive mode in the developer tools.

Gonna keep using Brave...

Theizestooke• 5 years ago

Does it have the ability to containerize websites, like Firefox does?

amarant• 5 years ago

Looks pretty good, but I'm a bit sceptical of the translation feature. They introduce it by saying Google has access to everything you translate, so therefore you should instead use their service, which sends the texts you translate to their servers in Iceland.

The formulations try really hard not to say "trust us with your data instead of big tech", which seems like an attempt to hide the fact that they do have access to everything you translate, much like Google would have... The only question is who you trust more - Vivaldi or Google?

1_player• 5 years ago

One thing is for sure. Vivaldi isn't in the ad tech business, or if it were it's not the biggest ad tech business in the world, and does not have any precedent in wanting to know everything I do, write, read, search, talk with to build an ad profile.

Who do you trust less with your most personal data - Vivaldi or Google? I think the answer is pretty easy.

It's just that, if you're the average person, you're already being spied upon massively by Google and you're trying to figure out if a company orders of magnitude smaller is a credible threat to your data.

thanatos5196• 5 years ago

Vivaldi.

kome2• 5 years ago

vivaldi :)

FlyingSnake• 5 years ago

I'm a long time Firefox user and I still use Firefox for personal use. However my workspace is Google Heavy and Google Meet is a 2nd class citizen on FF. I hate chrome, and Vivaldi is the best blink based browser that fills this niche. I just love the tree-style tabs and Vivaldi was the only blink based browser that provided that. I really love it so far, and it's perfect for my use case.

kitd2• 5 years ago

I use Vivaldi regularly for one reason: my company has disabled access to the developer tools on Chrome and FF. With Vivaldi (being Chromium) I have full access again!

Just don't tell them I told you ...

amitport• 5 years ago

what was the company's reasoning to disable access to the developer tools on Chrome and FF? why?

kitd2• 5 years ago

I don't have the precise wording to hand but it was along the lines of "security, protecting assets, etc, etc"

e3bc54b22• 5 years ago

My company does this too. Try installing Firefox in a nonstandard location, that fixed it for me. Now I enjoy regex search, unlock origin and tampermonkey and have little more peace of mind.

everybodyknows• 5 years ago

regex search

Meaning search over within browser window i.e. “Find in Page”?

shortformblog• 5 years ago

Since discussions about the browser’s approach to design philosophy and privacy are coming up in this thread, I’ll just flag that I did an interview with Jon von Tetzchner earlier this year where he talked about some of those things, as well as the lineage with Opera: https://tedium.co/2021/02/05/vivaldi-browser-history-profile...

ckotso• 5 years ago

I've been using Vivaldi as my main/work browser for the last ~1 year. Tab tiling and tab groups have been absolute game changers for my workflow and curbed my objections departing from the firefox camp.

It used to feel quite slow with too many open tabs when I started using it, and would improve by hibernating them every now and then (which is built-in functionality). It seems to have improved significantly with recent releases, haven't had to hibernate tabs for quite some time now.

tannhaeuser• 5 years ago

AFAIK Vivaldi is Webkit/Blink based so it'd be interesting to read a reflection on why the original Vivaldi code base was abandoned, if its abandoning was regretted, and on the state of the Web as a sustainable media format in general.

627467• 5 years ago

I love the tiling capabilities of Vivaldi, it's been impressing people over videoconference too.

I tried to use built in mail and calendar, but unfortunately my (work) life is too dependent on the little integrationa of Google calendar and gmail

hellpirat• 5 years ago

Is this super app? Oo

Renaud2• 5 years ago

I switched to Vivaldi from Chrome earlier this year as I was uncomfortable with the level of Google integration in that browser.

Vivaldi is based on Chromium and has lots of improvements over Chrome, like gestures out of the box, side panels, lots of clear options. And Chrome extensions work perfectly. I've had no issues so far.

The complexity of managing a browser engine that does what everyone expects requires humongous resources so I can understand the move to Chromium. As long as the google bits are removed and the extensions work, it's great to have an alternative to Edge and Chrome.

I mostly use Firefox as my daily browser and nothing would make me abandon it but it's nice to be able to segregate your various professional/private persona using different browsers.

BugWatch• 5 years ago

You can always use multiple ("specialized") instances of portable Firefox (with MultipleInstance=true in ini file). That's how I do it, and I've been using portable Firefox versions exclusively for 10+ years, I think.

kyoji• 5 years ago

You are probably already aware, but there is an official extension that offers this functionality via sand-boxed tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Renaud2• 5 years ago

Thanks for reminding me to try that again.

Last time was a couple of years ago and I had some trouble between instances but maybe I didn't do it right.

ProAm• 5 years ago

How are you installing Chrome extensions without signing into Chrome first? I find I cannot install any of them for Vivaldi without signing into Chrome (which sort of defeats the purpose)

Seirdy4• 5 years ago

If you want Chromium sans Google, Ungoogled-Chromium or any QtWebEngine-based browser should work much better.

Ungoogled-Chromium is what I use when I want to use a feature in Chromium Devtools that isn't available in FF, or when I just beed to test my site in Blink.

barberpole• 5 years ago

Vivaldi was a great musical genius.

rob74• 5 years ago

One killer feature for Vivaldi Mail would be supporting M$ two-factor authentication. Since my company made Exchange 2FA mandatory, I had to give up Thunderbird and use the Outlook 365 web interface due to lack of alternatives under Linux. That would definitely be in the spirit of giving you an alternative to Big Tech (at least on the client side). But I'm not sure if it's even doable though?!

philonoist• 5 years ago

If only we had a Vivaldi based on the Firefox.

luke2m• 5 years ago

Glad to see translation, because I do trust Vivaldi more than Google.

mattowen_uk2• 5 years ago

As Vivaldi Mail supports IMAP and POP3

And there was me hoping for Exchange-Sync support for Microsoft 365 email integration, to release the local reliance on Outlook 365 which gets worse with every revision :(

globular-toast2• 5 years ago

I've been using Thunderbird at every Microsoft infested company I've been at for approaching ten years now. It works fine for email, address book and accepting invitations etc. The only thing I have to use the (awful) web interface for is making appointments, but I rarely have to do that. There may be a way to make it work but I haven't bothered to look.

Al-Khwarizmi2• 5 years ago

Doesn't Microsoft 365 support POP3? My workplace uses that horrid mess called Microsoft 365, Office 365 or whatever name it has today, and its Outlook, but I can retrieve the emails from GMail connecting via POP3. But I don't know if you're looking for some more advanced functionality (not much of an expert in email, I just did the first thing I found to be able to process my email in a tolerable UI, it worked, so I moved on to more productive things).

mattowen_uk2• 5 years ago

For Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Tasks type syncing, you really need Exchange-Sync.

Once you've experienced all three working seamlessly on a mobile phone against Exchange (Online or on-prem) you realise how fragmented other 'Mail' sync systems are.

Maxburn• 5 years ago

Ugh, me too! First thing I checked but no ability to add exchange.

Unfortunately my org does not publish exchange as IMAP either.

swiley2• 5 years ago

It's great there are alternative browsers but being closed source and requiring a phone number is worse than Chrome.

eggman314• 5 years ago

Require a phone number?

merlinscholz• 5 years ago

https://login.vivaldi.net/profile/id/signup

Last line on the page: "Before using Vivaldi Webmail and the blogging platform, we’ll ask you to verify your phone number. That’s it."

m3kw9• 5 years ago

“ Simply put, the era of blindly trusting Big Tech is over.”, but why should I trust small tech? How are these privacy features compared with Apple?

_0w8t3• 5 years ago

It is really hard to subpoena a server in Iceland. Iceland gave asylum to Robert Fischer despite huge press from US to extradite him.

eingaeKaiy8ujie• 5 years ago

A closed source browser? lol

solmag• 5 years ago

I would love to use Vivaldi but it is by far the slowest browser I've tried to use.

thayne• 5 years ago

If Vivaldi were fully open source I would probably use it. But it's not.

niq999• 5 years ago

Using Vivaldi as my main browser since a few months ago. Tab grouping and tiling is great. The side panel is neat for checking on Skype without installing the app.

I didn't experience any slowdown, but not being able to drag and drop files from downloads is a pain in the ass. It's been brought up on the forums and left at that years ago.

0x49d12• 5 years ago

Using Vivaldi as my main browser for several months now. There are some problems with Google Docs, but other then that almost everything is fine. I really like company's attitude to its users, various researchers agree that they really don't leak what they say they don't. Firefox is superb too, but mobile browser experience is not there yet (I mean the new Android browser). Brave is another option, but I feel that Vivaldi is way more under my control and made "for me", even considering that Brave is open sourced.

apocolyps6• 5 years ago

I really want to like Vivaldi. It's the only browser (afaik) that supports tabs on the side. Right now I use "Tree Style Tabs" on Firefox with some custom CSS to get rid of the original tab bar.

Unfortunately I get a massive delay when fullscreening youtube videos in Vivaldi. The video first maximizes to the left half of my screen, and only then expands to the whole thing. Sadly a dealbreaker. FWIW its a little faster if I have the browser already maximized.

keithnz• 5 years ago

edge supports vertical tabs

jjjdjjddddsfsd• 5 years ago

I switched from Vivaldi to Edge because unfortunately Vivaldi become unusably slow for me beyond a certain amount of open tabs (hopefully just a bug they'll fix eventually).

I miss the little search bar for tabs that Vivaldi shows in the vertical tabs view.

vitorsr• 5 years ago

To complement:

Since as early as October 2020 on testing [1] and as early as January 2021 on stable [2].

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/vertical-tab...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-r...

lostmsu• 5 years ago

I can't use Edge for one stupid simple reason: Ctrl+Tab can not be made to cycle tabs in most recent use order, only in the order tabs are displayed. It is especially weird considering Alt-Tab in Windows does most recent.

timwis2• 5 years ago

Doesn't backing a chromium-based browser like Vivaldi or Brave push the industry further toward browser monopoly? (or at least in the rendering engine sense, as we once had with IE)

Seirdy4• 5 years ago

If you want to use a different engine, there's a plethora of Webkit2gtk-based browsers to choose from. GNOME Web (aka Epiphany) and Eolie are two good options for a basic experience; vimb, Luakit, and Nyxt are more advanced options.

timwis2• 5 years ago

I mean I just use Firefox. Unless you mean you can use those engines within Vivaldi?

frr149• 5 years ago

From the post:

(...)we offer Vivaldi Translate, a built-in, privacy-friendly translation feature, powered by Lingvanex and hosted by Vivaldi, keeping translations out of the reach of companies like Google or Microsoft.

Now I'm supposed to trust Vivaldi instead of Google or MS... Stopped reading right there.

junon2• 5 years ago

I'm not seeing this exact question answered elsewhere, but since Vivaldi is based on Chromium, does it have any code that randomly reaches out to remote servers (including but not limited to Google) aside from, of course, those which are requested by web page content?

rasz10• 5 years ago

Almost (1) all of it got removed or has option to disable, altho not always clearly explained (2).

(1) it touches Vivaldi server on startup.

(2) "Google Service DNS to help resolve navigational errors" equals https://medium.com/cloud-security/google-chrome-dns-security...

junon2• 5 years ago

Thanks!

alexyz12• 5 years ago

I wonder how they plan to not become evil? It is explicitly planned or just that they are trying to offer a new alternative to the current evil thats not evil yet? Either one is fine, just wondering out loud.

siproprio3• 5 years ago

I just can't stand the vivaldi UI. It's just too slow.

Especially everything tabs feels awful. From new tab, to drag-and-drop.

rasz10• 5 years ago

Firefox: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_b4JWi49tKJUfE8oOvx...

Opera: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_Rn6fiEoSZpDpNfvzIj...

Vivaldi: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_1KXF2VcFzD3BIAFVIJ...

siproprio3• 5 years ago

Yep.

piyush_soni• 5 years ago

Slightly off topic, but are there any users here who tried both Vivaldi and Brave? Which one did you keep and why?

Vivaldi 4.0

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