One alternative view on history that I think could be very useful, is a graph showing not just where I was, but also how I got there and where I went. It happens fairly often that I remember reading something through, say, HN, but I have no clue where the actual post was. Right now the best solution is to search for related words in my history and hope there isn't too much noise, or to search the site I remember coming from. That's incredibly suboptimal.
In fact, this is probably the reason I like Tree Style Tab[1] so much. Instead of a simple list, it shows my tabs in the context I opened them from.
I would like to do a custom search of the content of sites that I have visited.
Oftentimes, I'll remember I read something in the past few days, then it's a mad scramble to open various links to try to figure out if it's the right one.
I'm a bit hesitant to use a closed source browser. Browsers these days have such a large attack surface... I wouldn't trust something that is not developed and updated in the open
The most striking thing about Vivaldi's decision to remain closed-source is its provenance. Granted, von Tetzchner does have a history of working with closed-source software, but one would think after the loss of Presto (excepting that one brief leak[1]), that any ex-Opera heads would understand the potential value of open source and community contribution.
As someone who put a lot into the old pre-12 Opera community, I will never use a closed-source browser again. This is not a commentary on quality - Opera was hands down the best browser ever built, despite being closed-source - but rather on commitment. If Vivaldi fails, all of its users will be left out in the cold. Again.
Admittedly, it is not quite so bad a situation as Opera 12. Vivaldi is mostly/largely open source[2]. It still seems like a massive missed opportunity though.
There is "Otter Browser"[1] that is FOSS. It aims to be an Opera 12 clone (it doesn't use presto of course). I don't use it but it seems to have active development.
As an "alternative browser" I prefer Brave. It seems to load tabs the fastest, even faster than Opera with its own native ad-blocking. I used to like Opera before, but I stopped using it when it was bought by that Chinese group, and after seeing what they did to Opera Max, and app I found essential for saving data roaming costs. But they pretty much killed its usefulness when they started pushing their ads through it all the time.
Given that I don't write code, I'm happier with the idea of a closed-source browser. The problem I have with using Vivaldi is that it's too much like any other Chrome hack without really bringing back the stuff that made Opera a wonderful browser in a fundamental and meaningful way. Then again, I feel that Presto (and the "limitations" of that engine) was one of the greatest strengths, along with a built-in mindset that the user should control all of what they load and/or see.
Honest question: do you personally inspect the code of the browser of your choice; trust others to do that; or are just are you feeling better about having that possibility?
Given the last few years of adventure in the OpenSSL land I make no assumption about superiority of the open sourced solutions security-wise. Hence the curiosity, what is the motivation of others.
Agree, but beyond attack surface I just don't want to become accustomed to something that can be shut down, aqui-hire/closed down, or otherwise disappeared via the ongoing advance of technology.
This feature looks nice and I hope other browsers adopt and adapt and make more meaningful end-user advancements like this that are visible to the eye.
I wonder if for a company with less security resources than Google, it actually more secure to develop to develop close-sourced? Is source helpful when developing exploits? Intuitively it seems that it would be extremely helpful for the devious minded-individual.
I always used and loved Firefox because it was open source, but there have been a few articles now showing exactly how insecure Firefox is compared to Chrome. For this reason I've started to use Chrome until Firefox ups it's game.
This is innovative and might be enough to get me to switch browsers. I'm perplexed at why Firefox, Chrome and IE only ever seem to innovate the engine and have basically given up on doing anything novel with UI.
OK performance is nice to have but frankly I think that's just managers shoving resources at that because they know how to measure it and a 10.3% increase in speed or memory efficiency or something is easy to sell in a meeting.
UI innovation is much harder to quantify, requires more work to sell, and the payoff takes much longer to manifest, not least because every change will generate a certain number of complaints from people who think their pet issue should have been addressed first, like UI designers are interchangeable with performance specialists.
Chrome shot to first place because it kicked Firefox's ass on performance and IE's ass on reliable rendering (an opinion which you may or may not agree with). But while extensions are wonderful they can't and don't replace core UI innovation. And tbh I'm really bored with Chrome at this point; from a user point of view nothing significantly new has happened for a really long time.
Look at the bookmark management, for instance. It's been the same since forever, and if I want to socialize that information or turn it into a feed or something I have to go looking for third-party solutions, which are thin on the ground because people are reluctant to develop too much for a platform over which they have little or no control.
Firefox Test Pilot [1] is a more recent approach to testing new UI in Firefox. It's entirely extension based. I think this is a smart approach because it lets Mozilla quickly test new UI features without building it into the core browser before it's been vetted.
However its full potential is not ready yet, since Firefox has been migrating to WebExtensions, and this has not fully stabilized yet. Long term I think the WebExtensions move also makes sense, since it gives extension authors a stable API to work with, instead of XUL which can break with each Firefox update. And the architecture makes it easier to optimize threading performance and some form of security sandboxing.
So the point is, I think more UI experimentation is on Firefox's horizon, but they have to first stabilize the technical architecture before they can go full throttle on that.
> There is a reason for that – as a rule, browsers don’t really want you to use history. They want you to search and find things multiple times because search royalties are part of their business model.
I think that that's a little paranoid. There's just little demand for a revamped history tab. I like this change a lot, but it's certainly a case of not knowing I wanted it until I saw it.
I've always wondered why browsers don't put the contents of pages I visit into something like clucene, so I can search pages in my history by their contents, not just their titles and metadata. I'm sure there are security and storage tradeoffs, but to me this seems like a much more complete solution than this revamped history UI.
There is a recoll extension for Firefox, which updates an index visible from the desktop program. Not quite as neat as integrated history searching in the browser but still useful.
Back around 2000, I wrote a web proxy server that did this. It was a proxy server mainly because browser extensions were not a thing back then. I never released it because I never solved some performance issues (it was using a very naive implementation in a lot of ways). I did get a lot of use out of it for about a year, though.
I'm sure there are security/privacy trade-offs. Storage is not such a big thing. I found that index size leveled off somewhat after a point. It probably would use enough storage to make it unreasonable for mobile browsers.
This seems very cool and all, but surely 99.99% of regular users have never really thought about seeing their browsing history in a calendar view, or wanted or cared for statistics about it. I am fairly sure a significant proportion of users aren't even totally sure how to access their history - apart from during brief moments of paranoia when they want to keep nefarious things from a partner - and, if they really were looking for something they know they'd seen before, surely they'd just think, "I found this before, I'll just google for it again." (Similarly bookmarks, frankly.)
I guess my point is that this probably appeals to a very small subset of users, but it seems like a massively over-engineered solution for the majority of people, and feels a little bit like the result of trying to answer the question "What can we do that's different?" with a "Wouldn't it be cool if...", rather than solving problems that people genuinely face. Am I being unfair?
My read on the philosophy of Vivaldi is that it's deliberately developed for the minority of users. It's a reaction to the trend of browser features tending towards a generic middle.
They make take it too far (developing features that 1 or 2 users want), but it's still somewhat refreshing to see anyone set out with that kind of mindset.
In a hard market to crack it makes sense to try and do something different. If it fails then they're no worse off then before. If it works then it's a massive boom for them.
For what it's worth, this is a feature I've long wanted but hadn't realised it until now (I've always hated the way how browsers normally organise the history).
This might be true but in that case I'm in the 0.01% who want to know how much time I spend on HN and other sites instead of working. I ended up installing a time tracker(ManicTime) but I just realized that history statistics in the browser would be good enough for me.
Yes, you're being unfair. 'Solving problems people genuinely face' is never going to result in innovation, because it's maintenance for the existing paradigm. You are not going to find brilliant new ideas by pulling support tickets.
Take the most innovative thing you can't think of and then apply the same arguments to it. It's easy to see what problems things solve after they come into existence, less so in advance. That's why innovation involves the risk of failure.
This seems like one of the first features that will make me want to use Vivaldi. It's a project I've been rooting for a while, and this might be the turning point for me.
I personally like the built-in notes app with folders, it opens in a sidebar.
It's a nice looking browser too. Been using it on Win & Linux for the last few months and it's grown on me a lot.
Nice, but… This is not the history update I wanted from Vivaldi. The url autocompletion is annoying. I think it goes for the sub pages I clicked my way to, that shows up the most in history, instead of just the domain and the home page. I may click myself to my facebook profile 10 times during a fb session, but I don't want to land there.
Anyway, I'm using Vivaldi on Linux because the clean looks. No ugly borders or any of the other ugly Linux things. That and tab stacking.
All these features are pretty cool, but why can I still not dock the dev tools? Developers are the most likely early adopters, like myself. But not being able to dock the dev tools is seriously a killer. I've been watching Vivaldi from beta, and have enjoyed watching it, but every version I open it up, remember I can't dock dev tools, then close it. If you want to get me using Vivaldi, it's really simple: let me dock the dev tools.
Docked dev tools is in active development at Vivaldi at the moment, so fingers crossed it will be included in an upcoming release. It's easily one of the most requested features we get, understandably, and definitely not being ignored. :)
I am sure that Chrome users have similar if not higher level of history analytics/statistics but most of it seems to be only available to Google itself and not the end user.
Yes there is the web history Google provides but it is very basic level of access.
I'm kept on Chrome just because of it's ability to have multiple browser profiles - e.g. work and personal - from what I've seen, neither Safari, Opera, Vivaldi or Brave support this - am I wrong?
My main beef with Chrome isn't privacy - it's battery usage. I keep looking for a browser that doesn't kill my battery (MBP) but allows for multiple profiles.
I love the idea of doing something to make history more useful. Firefox is doing experiments with this, too (activity stream), but this is a lot more comprehensive.
I've tried Vivaldi and really like it, but I'm pretty dedicated to Firefox. I'd probably play with Vivaldi more if they had a Mozilla sync adapter.
[+] [-] jorams|9 years ago|reply
In fact, this is probably the reason I like Tree Style Tab[1] so much. Instead of a simple list, it shows my tabs in the context I opened them from.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
[+] [-] nachtigall|9 years ago|reply
The tails project experiments with this in Servo and browser.html:
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/lossless-web-navigation-with...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518919
[+] [-] newman314|9 years ago|reply
I would like to do a custom search of the content of sites that I have visited.
Oftentimes, I'll remember I read something in the past few days, then it's a mad scramble to open various links to try to figure out if it's the right one.
[+] [-] arianvanp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucideer|9 years ago|reply
As someone who put a lot into the old pre-12 Opera community, I will never use a closed-source browser again. This is not a commentary on quality - Opera was hands down the best browser ever built, despite being closed-source - but rather on commitment. If Vivaldi fails, all of its users will be left out in the cold. Again.
Admittedly, it is not quite so bad a situation as Opera 12. Vivaldi is mostly/largely open source[2]. It still seems like a massive missed opportunity though.
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-01-12-P...
[2] https://vivaldi.net/userblogs/entry/a-few-words-about-open-s...
[+] [-] gjjrfcbugxbhf|9 years ago|reply
I've tried it out and it seems nice and powerful.
Yes I know they publish some source and no I don't use Chrome - for the same reason.
[+] [-] leni536|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://otter-browser.org/
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
https://brave.com/
[+] [-] vasili111|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Endy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimliu|9 years ago|reply
Given the last few years of adventure in the OpenSSL land I make no assumption about superiority of the open sourced solutions security-wise. Hence the curiosity, what is the motivation of others.
[+] [-] K_REY_C|9 years ago|reply
This feature looks nice and I hope other browsers adopt and adapt and make more meaningful end-user advancements like this that are visible to the eye.
[+] [-] chairmanwow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osiris|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Accacin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
OK performance is nice to have but frankly I think that's just managers shoving resources at that because they know how to measure it and a 10.3% increase in speed or memory efficiency or something is easy to sell in a meeting.
UI innovation is much harder to quantify, requires more work to sell, and the payoff takes much longer to manifest, not least because every change will generate a certain number of complaints from people who think their pet issue should have been addressed first, like UI designers are interchangeable with performance specialists.
Chrome shot to first place because it kicked Firefox's ass on performance and IE's ass on reliable rendering (an opinion which you may or may not agree with). But while extensions are wonderful they can't and don't replace core UI innovation. And tbh I'm really bored with Chrome at this point; from a user point of view nothing significantly new has happened for a really long time.
Look at the bookmark management, for instance. It's been the same since forever, and if I want to socialize that information or turn it into a feed or something I have to go looking for third-party solutions, which are thin on the ground because people are reluctant to develop too much for a platform over which they have little or no control.
[+] [-] abrowne|9 years ago|reply
"Boy howdy do normal users have hard time with non-conventional browser interfaces!" https://medium.com/project-tofino/re-defining-the-tofino-pro...
[+] [-] talklittle|9 years ago|reply
However its full potential is not ready yet, since Firefox has been migrating to WebExtensions, and this has not fully stabilized yet. Long term I think the WebExtensions move also makes sense, since it gives extension authors a stable API to work with, instead of XUL which can break with each Firefox update. And the architecture makes it easier to optimize threading performance and some form of security sandboxing.
So the point is, I think more UI experimentation is on Firefox's horizon, but they have to first stabilize the technical architecture before they can go full throttle on that.
[1]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/
[+] [-] nonsince|9 years ago|reply
I think that that's a little paranoid. There's just little demand for a revamped history tab. I like this change a lot, but it's certainly a case of not knowing I wanted it until I saw it.
[+] [-] mhaymo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yread|9 years ago|reply
http://help.opera.com/Mac/10.50/en/history.html
[+] [-] dingaling|9 years ago|reply
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recoll-indexe...
The one complication I found was ensuring that I blacklisted sensitive websites such as banks.
[+] [-] waldir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoGravitas|9 years ago|reply
I'm sure there are security/privacy trade-offs. Storage is not such a big thing. I found that index size leveled off somewhat after a point. It probably would use enough storage to make it unreasonable for mobile browsers.
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bshimmin|9 years ago|reply
I guess my point is that this probably appeals to a very small subset of users, but it seems like a massively over-engineered solution for the majority of people, and feels a little bit like the result of trying to answer the question "What can we do that's different?" with a "Wouldn't it be cool if...", rather than solving problems that people genuinely face. Am I being unfair?
[+] [-] lucideer|9 years ago|reply
My read on the philosophy of Vivaldi is that it's deliberately developed for the minority of users. It's a reaction to the trend of browser features tending towards a generic middle.
They make take it too far (developing features that 1 or 2 users want), but it's still somewhat refreshing to see anyone set out with that kind of mindset.
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laumars|9 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, this is a feature I've long wanted but hadn't realised it until now (I've always hated the way how browsers normally organise the history).
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] didymospl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
Take the most innovative thing you can't think of and then apply the same arguments to it. It's easy to see what problems things solve after they come into existence, less so in advance. That's why innovation involves the risk of failure.
[+] [-] flippyhead|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chairmanwow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kagamine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] towb|9 years ago|reply
Anyway, I'm using Vivaldi on Linux because the clean looks. No ugly borders or any of the other ugly Linux things. That and tab stacking.
[+] [-] nhumrich|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhumrich|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Touche|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonmccull|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msimpson|9 years ago|reply
https://forum.vivaldi.net/search?term=slow&in=titlesposts&so...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3052560/browsers/vivaldi-brow...
https://thequo.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/one-glaring-problem-...
etc...
[+] [-] jonmccull|9 years ago|reply
It's part of the 1.8 release of the browser launched today.
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sengork|9 years ago|reply
Yes there is the web history Google provides but it is very basic level of access.
[+] [-] mdekkers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inthewoods|9 years ago|reply
My main beef with Chrome isn't privacy - it's battery usage. I keep looking for a browser that doesn't kill my battery (MBP) but allows for multiple profiles.
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
the address bar brings up the Win10 OSK just fine. But any input areas in pages require that i bring up the keyboard manually.
And the whole browser seems to go unresponsive to touch input at irregular intervals.
Sad really, as they give me the ability to scale the UI as i see fit. Thus making the various elements that much easier to hit with a finger.
[+] [-] NoGravitas|9 years ago|reply
I've tried Vivaldi and really like it, but I'm pretty dedicated to Firefox. I'd probably play with Vivaldi more if they had a Mozilla sync adapter.
[+] [-] nerform|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pingec|9 years ago|reply