Vivaldi Browser 5.0

https://vivaldi.com/changelog-vivaldi-browser-5-0/

by philonoist • 5 years ago

171 149 5 years ago

quaffapint• 5 years ago

I've read their business model... https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

I just wonder how well it works in supporting them vs asking for money from their customers to support a decent/private browser stack.

webmobdev3• 5 years ago

Honestly, what is there to support? Once you strip Chromium of all the code that uses any Google services, more than half the job is done.

bogwog3• 5 years ago

Vivaldi is not just another repackaged Chromium, it has it's own completely custom UI and special features. For example, it has built-in mail, rss, calendar, and contacts "apps", and a built in screenshot tool that lets you capture an entire page or a single element.

Features like that are why you would want to use Vivaldi over another Chromium-based browser. I don't even know if they actually went through the effort of a thorough de-Googling. Also, their custom UI is not open source, so the browser is partially proprietary.

bstar777• 5 years ago

That was an interesting read, I was not aware that we got this info from the horse's mouth.

Vivaldi has been criticized because it appears to phone home a lot. I've not tested that myself, but I assumed it was true. I might give it another shot because I do enjoy its Opera-like feel over Chrome or Chromium.

pseudalopex2• 5 years ago

Themes and the translation panel are the highlights according to their blog. And speed improvements.[1]

[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-5-0-desktop-themes-translat...

zamadatix5• 5 years ago

"Speed improvements" in every release but there must be something about the way the browser is implemented that just kills performance/efficiency vs other Chromium browsers. Even a basic test like Speedometer 2.0 shoots out that DOM manipulations are 75% the speed of the same benchmark on Chrome, what on earth is it doing to cause that?

The interface is great but between performance and bugs I've never been able to stay on it for more than a couple of months.

jadbox2• 5 years ago

Is this still true of v5?

cturtle• 5 years ago

The UI is written in React, and apparently runs as a sort of an extension to chromium[0] according to a Vivaldi dev. I expect that would be a large source of performance decreases with a JS powered UI. It's certainly an impressive UI though.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/f9ui2b/is_t...

kangaroozach• 5 years ago

Is it built on chromium?

pseudalopex2• 5 years ago

Yes.

sandreas• 5 years ago

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/

SwiftyBug• 5 years ago

I don't understand that obsession browser developers have with themes. To the point it's a highlight in a major version.

KarlKemp2• 5 years ago

Agreed… there’s very little surface that isn’t taken up by the website, so it makes far less sense than, say a terminal. It’s a uniquely bad fit for theming.

A useable method of styling webpages, however, would be quite interesting. CSS just doesn’t quite work when used generically on all sites, except for maybe font sizes. Chrome’s in-beta automatic dark modes are maybe one working example.

I’d appreciate, for example, some way to make better use of the 6000px of screen width I have. Unfortunately, with mobile-first and portrait-mode prevalence, the trend seems to be going back to optimizing for 800px.

mixmastamyk2• 5 years ago

Yes, the last thing I want are things competing with the page I’m reading.

riidom2• 5 years ago

That#s what I like most about this browser I think. I have the UI scaled down to 80% (would recommend to anybody to give this a try as well!).

wussboy• 5 years ago

Agree. I've never used one for longer than it took to briefly click to it to see what it looked like.

webmobdev3• 5 years ago

Users like it, especially if you can customise it. (Winamp comes to mind - themes were a huge deal with it and one of the reasons behind its popularity). And it also generates a lot of community activity around the software, which adds value and provides free publicity.

mixmastamyk2• 5 years ago

Music software skinz can add some value, because they do not not directly compete with the content. Browsers not so much.

zamadatix5• 5 years ago

There is a bigger group of users that care about how cute/fun/whatever their browser looks than the group of users that care about engine improvements and new technology support.

Tempest19814• 5 years ago

As someone who has installed in dozens of custom fonts and themes for my IDE, there's a definite appeal!

skinkestek• 5 years ago

User configurable themes is fantastic!

Look at Firefox now for an example of what happens when developers can introduce their "I know best" themes:

I constantly get confused and think the active tab is next to the actually active tab.

Irony is the idea behind removing actual themability seems to be to prevent people from seeing badly styled browsers, and yet this is the second most annoying one I am aware of. (Chrome annoys me more, not because it is bad but because I don't like Chrome ;-)

pvinis• 5 years ago

color.firefox.com is great for that!

hulitu• 5 years ago

Because chrome and firefox literarly thrashed the browser experience. Not everybody loves gray or black and 1 font size does not fit all people.

riidom2• 5 years ago

I wondered about that too. It seems like a bit of "filler content" to be honest. There are not many new features at all, the new thing here is the theme management in first place. The release notes in general are pretty weak compared to pervious releases of Vivaldi.

I mean I don't care there is always a bit of a hanger now and then, I still love Vivaldi. Just saying I can relate to these observation.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

I think Chrome handles themes best, at least on Linux. It automatically grabs your GTK stylesheet's color palette and recolors the window accordingly. Combined with proper window decorations, it's a surprisingly "native" feel out of the box.

handrous3• 5 years ago

As far as just colors and font size and such, that used to be an OS feature that every (native) application got for free.

FF had it years and years ago, too. I tried it a bit back then and then stopped, because almost all the themes just made it harder to use. Not sure what's up with their making such a big deal out of adding a weaker and less-customizable version of it recently with their color themes. "We redid an old feature, but worse".

Nux3• 5 years ago

Fun fact, Microsoft (Skype) will not accept user@vivaldi.net as a personal email address for new accounts.

It needs to be gmail/yahoo/outlook etc.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FETZDicXEAEjlSQ?format=jpg&name=...

roody15• 5 years ago

That is complete garbage. Lame Microsoft

webmobdev3• 5 years ago

This seems to be a new trend - even IBM doesn't allow you to create accounts with non-American / non-BigTech email IDs (for their free cloud offering). Makes you wonder what is going on behind the scenes.

usr1106• 5 years ago

The Linux foundation is in the same league: They are sending me spam^Hmarketing communication, but when I want to unsubscribe they tell me that I have an invalid email. The provider of that address ended up on some self-declared blacklist years ago for some time, which might explain part of it. But not stopping to sending email to those you don't want to deal with is nonsense. Not accepting unsubscribes probably illegal in many countries.

handrous3• 5 years ago

What's going on behind the scenes is that very few people don't use an email address with one of a handful of TLDs, and that restricting signups to a known-good list solves some support and a lot of abuse problems.

Not saying it justifies it, but that's for-sure one reason places do that.

mattl• 5 years ago

They also won't take hey.com

luke2m• 5 years ago

I don’t think it’s anything against competition, just that they don’t have vivaldi.net on their public email allowlist. They want enterprise customers to pay for enterprise Microsoft services.

Nux3• 5 years ago

IMHO it's a dumb policy and against competition. This is discriminatory and abusive.

Pretty sure there are thousands or tens of thousands of email domains out there that are personal. Nobody can track them all. How many of you guys don't have your own personal domains?

zamadatix5• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if that because Vivaldi had/has a corporate MS service using the domain in some way. E.g. if I test with one of my personal domains with MX records/email configured it continues just fine, if I test with one of my personal domains without email configure it continues just fine, if I try to create a personal account using my work's domain (tied to O365) it blocks it.

So it's not that you can only register gmail/yahoo/etc it seems that the domain can't already be registered for non personal use at MS. Maybe there are other criteria as well (perhaps a way to explicitly exclude your domain if you don't want people registering it for example) but it's a lot more open than "only these services allowed".

Nux3• 5 years ago

Ok, good.. Then vivaldi.net is specifically blacklisted then.

I checked and vivaldi.net is their community, everyone can sign up for email, whereas vivaldi.com is their "commercial" email domain.

Both hosted in Iceland with valid MX that has got nothing to do with o365...

Oxodao• 5 years ago

Pretty sure that's no longer the case or used to not be the case as I have a Microsoft account I use on Skype among other MS services that is firstname@lastname.fr

amyjess2• 5 years ago

Have Vivaldi's devs said whether or not they'll be requiring Manifest V3? I'd hope that if anyone rejects V3 it would be Vivaldi...

gildas• 5 years ago

If Vivaldi doesn't have a store, then they won't have the choice to follow Google because developers won't be able to make their Manifest V2 extensions available for download.

amyjess2• 5 years ago

There's always sideloading at least.

rasz2• 5 years ago

They declared building their own declarative adblocker, with blackjack and hookers. They have no money to maintain own fork.

jernejzen• 5 years ago

So guess that if you want extensions you need to go through Google machinery.. and your back to their telemetry empire?

jadbox2• 5 years ago

I don't follow- Doesn't Vivaldi support any chrome extension?

mthoms• 5 years ago

Yes, but you have to get them through the Chrome Web Store. It's the same with Brave.

cute_boi• 5 years ago

No container support? It was the most requested feature. I use vivaldi instead of brave when firefox fails to support website. But having no container is kinda sad :(

freediver4• 5 years ago

Congrats to Vivaldi!

There is a good interview with Vivaldi founder on Tedium [1] where he basically says that because most browsers are built on Chromium nowadays, you have to innovate on features and that is the direction they took. And really the number of features in Vivaldi is staggering including some great ones like Tab Stacking and Tab Tiling.

But adding this many features took a toll on performance and it is about 25% slower than other Chromium based browsers. Also I assume that is the reason why is there no Vivaldi on iOS.

[1] https://tedium.co/2021/02/05/vivaldi-browser-history-profile...

therealmarv• 5 years ago

There is not even one Chromium (or Firefox) based browser on iOS because it's not allowed to publish other browser engines on iOS!

ajhurliman2• 5 years ago

I'm using Brave on my iPhone right now.

freediver4• 5 years ago

To be more accurate there are no Blink or Gecko based browsers on iOS. Both Firefox and Chrome (and many other Chromium browsers) exist on iOS, using WebKit rendering engine.

rjzzleep2• 5 years ago

Is the UI still as horribly laggy? I try vivaldi every other year because people say it's faster, but it's almost as if those people only run that beast on a desktop or fully specced 15" laptops

jjordan• 5 years ago

I'm in the same boat. I've wanted to switch to them for years, but once I get it loaded with my requisite plugins and start using it for a while, the UI inevitably begins to experience random lags and moments of unresponsiveness.

vadfa• 5 years ago

Exactly what I was going to ask. They wrote the UI in javascript with obvious consequences. The day they rewrite it in a normal language they will see me again.

Tomis023• 5 years ago

Runs fine on my nothing special 6-7 year old computer. I also disable tab rendering and use the tab side panel instead, I'm not sure if that makes a difference.

Chevalier2• 5 years ago

If anything, Vivaldi seems faster for me than Chrome was. I haven't seen any of the performance slowdowns that other people on this thread have mentioned. Possibly because I haven't enabled the Mail/Calendar/Feeds full-fat option?

loonster• 5 years ago

I've had some websites that wouldn't load properly and I had to fallback to firefox. (Prior to today, I was using 3.5. So hopefully that has been fixed)

rasz2• 5 years ago

5.0 finally started working on speed of UI. Tab operations no longer slow down with the number of opened Tabs for example.

shortformblog• 5 years ago

Author of that piece—was great chatting with Jon von Tetzchner. FWIW, I daily drive it on an M1 MacBook Air now that there’s a native Apple Silicon version and I don’t really see the slowdown issues.

Also, his recommendation in the piece of creating a minimal profile is one that I think a lot of people might find valuable when using Vivaldi.

drewcoo• 5 years ago

Low performance seems strange, given the perf culture at Opera. I assume they still beat a potato, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaT7thTxyq8

zaiste• 5 years ago

Congrats on the release! I like this browser a lot; it's a comprehensive, battery-included solution.

If they supported Firefox-like multi-account containers [1], it'd switch entirely to Vivaldi. Their tab grouping is really good, the session separation is the only thing missing here. :)

[1] https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/25289/multi-account-containe...

throwaway123x2• 5 years ago

With FireFox becoming more and more unusable, does anybody with experience know if Vivaldi or Brave are objectively better (or faster or more stable)?

maccam912• 5 years ago

I switched from firefox to vivaldi about a year ago. So far it's been an improvement, tab stacks especially in my opinion.

Scarbutt• 5 years ago

Mozilla should switch to chromium.

laumars• 5 years ago

No. Competition is healthy and that includes browser rendering engines too.

ibdf• 5 years ago

I switched to Brave this past year... so far so good. Firefox is fine, but I need a chromium browser for development, so chromium - google seems like a good alternative. I tried Vivaldi a couple of years ago but it didn't stick... will try again.

malermeister• 5 years ago

What's your problem with FF specifically? I keep hearing people complain, but it seems like the same ol browser to me?

patall2• 5 years ago

Honest question, how is FireFox becoming unusable for you? I am using it on both Linux and Windows and do not really have any problems with it. Sure, sometimes a web site does not load properly but more often than not is because some add-ons like ad-blocker and no-script are intervening for me. In other cases, its obvious that the website was never tested in anything but chrome. In those cases where I really need it, I have some chromium-based browser as backup on all my devices. But daily work on FireFox is just fine for me.

Your comment reminds me of how people were complaining for a long time that FireFox had become so slow, while I was browsing with multiple dozens of open tabs on my 8GB system all along. I do not want to say that this is not the case for you, but I honestly cannot reproduce it on three different laptops.

bogwog3• 5 years ago

Agreed, it has been my daily driver for years and I have never had any problems with it. I think the guy your replied to is just riding on the Mozilla hate train.

To be fair, Mozilla does deserve 99.999% of the hate it gets, but that doesn't justify making dishonest claims about Firefox just to stick it to Mozilla.

Eelongate• 5 years ago

With Firefox 93, I was restarting the browser 3 or 4 times a day because it kept crashing while playing videos. It would start with videos loading but not playing, and then moments later the whole browser would lock up and leave no choice but to kill it and restart. So far Firefox 94 seems to have that issue resolved, but that experience with 93 was very nearly enough to make me quit.

(I should probably mention, another long-running complaint I have with Firefox is the community's habit of gaslighting anybody who talks about Firefox's problems with the usual "I never experience that so your experiences are invalid" So please spare me this time.)

y-c-o-m-b2• 5 years ago

I'm also curious about this. I finally upgraded from a 4GB RAM system to something modern, but FireFox was my primary on that machine for years with no issues. Firefox mobile has atrocious performance for me, but their desktop app is solid and it's what I'm viewing HN on right now. I especially love the silent updates.

EDIT: by "modern" I mean I'm on an I5 with 8GB RAM lol. I do have a Lenovo Legion 7 with a 3080 but use it only for gaming. This I5/8GB combo is my daily driver and works great with Firefox, loads instantly and I can have a dozen or more tabs open no problem.

st3fan• 5 years ago

"Can't use $ in password" - i'm curious what the story is

drcongo4• 5 years ago

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton of unnecessary cognitive load that 0.1% of their users will find useful. Browser design by committee.

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2006/02...

RussianCow• 5 years ago

a ton of unnecessary cognitive load that 0.1% of their users will find useful.

Maybe it's been designed specifically for that 0.1%? There's nothing wrong with not catering to the masses.

drcongo4• 5 years ago

Yeah, sorry, wasn't meaning to hate on Vivaldi. I'm sure it's great for those who want those features.

kunagi72• 5 years ago

There's a lot of browsers out there that already give the experience you want. Like Ungoogled Chromium (or regular Chromium).

I always see a lot of power users being enraged to other browsers when they remove features that the 1~5% of their users use so it's a bit weird to see protests against one of the few browsers that attempt to reverse the oversimplification trend.

Vivaldi's main deal is allowing the user to customize most of their browser. Themes, buttons, custom CSS, even side menu options. Even if they have improved it quite a bit there's still a performance hit.

drcongo4• 5 years ago

I use Safari for actual browsing because it's really unbeatable at it - very fast rendering, has tabs. I'd argue Chromium doesn't quite live up to that promise thanks to the horrible UI rendering and spectacular battery drain that it inherits from Chrome. Firefox I think does a nice compromise between being a good browser and having all that customisation stuff that the kids seem to like, but it does have a tiny hit on performance there too, ie: when opening a new tab the UI lag is as bad as Chrome. Vivaldi takes it to an extreme, and obviously gets the extreme UI lag that goes with that.

I'm probably in a minority, but for me anything that gets in the way of me opening a new tab and loading a webpage in it is just harm.

dafaks• 5 years ago

well, waterfox without proton theme works like charm for me

LinAGKar• 5 years ago

That's the sort of attitude that's ruining Firefox. They're removing everything that makes it useful in a appempt to turn it into a Chrome clone. Vivaldi is the only remotely viable alternative to Firefox.

bogwog3• 5 years ago

Vivaldi is clearly for power users, but you're definitely exaggerating. It's not that complicated, and performance is fine.

Being based on Chromium is the only thing that keeps me from using it as my main browser.

brnt• 5 years ago

On top of that, their open core model makes it hard to say how secure all that UI is and how pro-user they actually are. In that phone-home test they had some of the worst score n that regard, together with Edge.

WORMS_EAT_WORMS• 5 years ago

It is odd. Also harder to trust a small org.

Maybe an angle to getting a size-able slice of the browser market for a start up at this point would be just being super simple, very private-first, and than have a better development experience + inspector than Chrome's. Then let all the "tech" people push it out. No easy task.

tomrod• 5 years ago

Its mobile browser is fantastic. Much better than Firefox, Opera, or Chrome, IMHO.

throw10920• 5 years ago

a ton of unnecessary cognitive load

I'm curious - what features does Vivaldi have that add cognitive load to users not using them?

ochronus3• 5 years ago

+1 - I _really_ wanted to like Vivaldi, but... no.

chimen• 5 years ago

Switch browsers then, you have alternatives. Nothing wrong with what they do, this is not the way to appreciate free stuff. We're not in 2003 when IE was your only tool.

Are we offended by too many options now? I want a rendering engine with adblocker and a mail client blended in. Most of my time is spent in a browser when I'm online so, for me, it makes sense for my browser to be as capable as it can.

y-c-o-m-b2• 5 years ago

I've been using Vivaldi for at least a couple of years now - strictly for banking - and I fully agree on the slowness of the application. It's awful.

I came from the original Opera (before it transferred ownership) and I loved the UI/UX and performance of it. I was hoping Vivaldi would replicate that, but it's been an enormous pain in the ass lately with websites either not loading (they work fine in Firefox and Chrome), tabs crashing spontaneously, the app crashing spontaneously, and the horrid performance. These issues seem to occur across my different other laptops also.

I use it exclusively for banking as I said, so it's only used once or twice a month but I would never use Vivaldi on a regular basis with the way it currently works.

I will say though, I really like their mobile app so far. There was a weird tab duplication bug on it earlier in the year and they fixed it really quick, but outside of that it's been pretty great.

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

I want a rendering engine and some tabs

Even tabs don't have to be a thing for an app (e.g. a web browser) to manage. A good window manager could tabify anything. This would require a standardized API for windows to expose the opened view URIs to be really good in replacing app-level tabs though.

Tomis023• 5 years ago

making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been.

Everything you think you gain in speed in Chrome/Firefox, you instantly lose when having to deal with their oversimplified UX. Vivaldi's focus on features means that I can easily manage and switch between tens of tabs - having an equivalent functionality on other browsers via extensions is both very slow and clunky, and the simple act of switching between two tabs is annoyingly unergonomic. By using Vivaldi I must've gained so far entire days of life that would've been otherwise lost by blindly ctrl-tabbing my way to the desired tab.

selfhoster11• 5 years ago

It seems like it's just not a browser for you. There are a lot of Chromium based browsers with a lot simpler UIs for those that seek that.

pixelgeek2• 5 years ago

So two questions for the groupmind here.

1) I asked this previously but is it really that difficult to take a screenshot on Windows?

"Vivaldi’s built-in Capture tool lets you capture either a Full Page screenshot, or a Selection of the screen that you define. It can be accessed in a number of ways through the Vivaldi UI to give you flexibility in how you implement the tool."

2) The fully loaded version of the browser comes with a mail client, calendar and contacts. Didn't Netscape Navigator already show us that this confluence of features was a disaster for a browser?

wejick• 5 years ago

I personally can't live without Firefox capture functionality. Control + shift + S. Very convenient.

It may be similar situation for vivaldi user.

rpdillon• 5 years ago

Yes! The ability to hover over parts of the DOM and grab screenshots is a big upgrade from the built-in OS functionality on Mac and Linux, since it removes the fiddling I normally have to do to grab the optimal region. I don't use Windows, so I'm not sure about the comparison there.

stetrain• 5 years ago

I think the point of that feature is to take a screenshot of the full web page, even the part that is currently scrolled out of view. That's not something that the OS screenshot tool can do.

pixelgeek2• 5 years ago

I get it now

Isthatablackgsd3• 5 years ago

"Vivaldi’s built-in Capture tool lets you capture either a Full Page screenshot, or a Selection of the screen that you define. It can be accessed in a number of ways through the Vivaldi UI to give you flexibility in how you implement the tool."

Not difficult, it is the limitation of the OS. Desktop OSes don't have a way to tell the browser to take a screenshot of the full page. So it is limited of what it can do. This is where Firefox and Vivaldi comes in, they provided the tools that allows them to scroll the entire page internally and take a screenshot. If there is a website with 5 pages, the OS only can take a picture of what is actively displaying. The browsers itself can barrow deeper to get a full pages.

There is one issue I have with Vivaldi Capture, it seems to capture the webpage with lower DPI than OS capture tools. Windows and macOS capture tool looks crisp and clean. In Vivaldi, it is not crisp and I have a hard time to read the text in it. Not sure if they improve it lately.

_0w8t2• 5 years ago

A Vivaldi developer here. In which OS and on which pages do you experience this effect? Also, what is DPI of the screen?

tssva• 5 years ago

Taking a screenshot on Windows is easy. PrtScn key will copy a screenshot of the current screen to the clipboard, Alt+PrtScn will copy the current window to the clipboard, Windows+PrtScn will save a screenshot of the current screen to the Screenshot folder of the Pictures folder. Additionally, Windows ships with the Snip & Sketch tool which is activated with Windows+Shift+S. It allows you to capture a whole screen, a window, a rectangle or a free form area of a screen. It also has tools for annotating the screenshot.

kkjjkgjjgg• 5 years ago

Used it for a while, but unfortunately performance was degrading eventually (earlier version).

However I really miss one simple feature, that they have a search field above the vertical tabs that can be used to filter the tabs.

nice_byte• 5 years ago

i've been using vivaldi for the past 3 years, and it's fantastic. i really like the customizability, the stacked tabs feature, the builtin rss reader (which by the way, lets you subscribe to youtube channels!). really hope they make it, because the thought of going back to chrome makes me shudder now.

csomar• 5 years ago

I've been using Vivaldi for a few months now and basically forgot about Firefox.

1. Address Bar abd Tabs in the bottom without having to hack Firefox XUL/CSS.

2. Tabs. I have 7-8 stacks at any point. For example, I can start reading HN articles, leave the tabs open and them move to another stack for work, research, whatever. I have around 100+ tabs open at any time (and they consuming a little over 12Gb of memory). The tabs stick at restarts.

3. Email. Simple notifications. Useful since I'm running on Arch with no desktop/notifications, etc...

4. Chromium. I'm sorry but as of right now it's better than Firefox Quantum.

5. Screen Capture, Transaction, QrCode support, Chrome plugins, etc...

skrowl3• 5 years ago

Rather than tab stacks, try Firefox Containers + https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/

It gives you the option to hide all tabs that aren't in your current container. The other advantage it gives over tab stacks in Vivaldi / Edge / Chrome is that they're actually containerized. Tabs in container A can't access anything from tabs in container B.

If you're running a device with low RAM, you can add https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... with the option turned on to discard tabs as soon as they're hidden.

stereoradonc2• 5 years ago

Possibly the only advantage that Firefox has over Chrome.

smartbit• 5 years ago

Rather than tab stacks, try Firefox Containers + https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/

conex hasn’t been updated for 3 years. Are you sure you want to recommend it?

pndy• 5 years ago

The ability to set texture beneath tabs bar and have it colored according to either theme color or site accent color remains still broken, since few major versions already. Shame because I really liked that little feature; despite of my reports, nobody dared to see what's up with this issue.

Overall, it's a really good browser that fits my needs with few extensions. I've moved to Vivaldi after Firefox released version 60 - my heavily customized profile was damaged beyond recovery; luckily I had already bookmarks backed up and passwords stored outside.

Chevalier2• 5 years ago

Vivaldi is easily the best browser I've ever used, bar none. But for lacking two-factor authentication on the account itself, I have no complaints - the vertical tabs, web panels, bookmark tree, and the Human theme are unrivaled by any other browser.

I didn't discover Vivaldi until recently, but I'm a fanatical convert now. Strongly recommended.

nsonha2• 5 years ago

A speed chart on the Downloads panel? The same reaction I had when windows 8 added a chart for file copying speed: who cares?

I get that there are nerds who like a number for everything. Just a speed number is fine, but almost no one just sit there and watch a live chart of file copying/downloading speed, as if they have nothing else to do with their computer.

zmix• 5 years ago

I once liked Vivaldi. However, a few months ago I started to dislike it, since it adds more and more useless stuff instead of being innovative:

* Graphics RGB color diagram * Mail client * Calendar client * Since over a year I can't play back video, that ha audio, because then the browser hangs for minutes. * Theme editor * Philips Hue integration * Razor Chroma intergration * (sophisticated) time based theme changes * built in Vivaldia computer game

and these were just the things I found in the first four settings categories... Oh, Notes comes to mind... that doesn't belong into the browser, it belongs into a separate application...and so on...

Yes, the tabs are nice, the quick command (F2) is nice, there is a few other things (it doesn't crash, which is a big one!) but the only reason I am still with it, is, that I have already stored so much information in it and I am too lazy to switch.

It's a browser, that is slowly getting infantile.

yborg• 5 years ago

Agree with the bloat issue, I use Vivaldi because tab tiling, which is unique to this browser, but the additional functionality seems like it will become a crippling maintenance burden for a small team. I get that Tetzchner is trying to stand out in a sea of Chrome clones, but things like the Hue bulb integration and especially the not really fun or interesting embedded minigame are particularly egregious examples of things which are just wasting time, as well as introducing bugs and attack surface. Just shows a lack of discipline from the product management. Make this stuff an optional extension or something.

zafiro17• 5 years ago

Every time a vivaldi post shows up on HN it attracts a lot of negative comments (and some positive ones). Will just add my voice to the mix - Vivaldi is my primary browser and I love it. On my 5 year old laptop I experience no slowness, and I generally enjoy it's very user-focused features. I also enjoyed Opera prior to version 12. I recognize it's not the browser for everyone, but on my Linux boxes it's the second app I install (mutt is the first one). Your experience may vary.

CynicusRex• 5 years ago

Hands down the best browser I've ever used because of their customizability and speed, and the support on their forum is swift and effective. Moreover, the developers are staunchly against crypto“currencies”. Seldom, some websites break, but that's because I extensively use uMatrix.

mdrzn• 5 years ago

I've been using Vivaldi for about 3 months and I'm so close to going back to Chrome.

RTX 2060, 32GBs RAM and YouTube still lags???

Vivaldi Browser 5.0

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