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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] oblio|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grishka|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] littlecranky67|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 55555|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whikhngbu359|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marban|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krisgenre|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjs_|4 years ago|reply
- Jamie Zawinski
[+] [-] metalliqaz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnWhigham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thunderbong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] forgotpwd16|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drdavid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muyuu|4 years ago|reply
so, technically not very different to Brave although many users are led to believe it kept the former Opera render codebase
[+] [-] howolduis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbsb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bookofsand|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtweetyhack|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ACS_Solver|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Renaud|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ckotso|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rplnt|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grishka|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andai|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kunagi7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thanatos519|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] j_koreth|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Vinnl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitigchi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idoubtit|4 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] warpech|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] kitd|4 years ago|reply
Just don't tell them I told you ...
[+] [-] amitport|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e3bc54b2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FlyingSnake|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shortformblog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niq999|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amarant|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] edu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apocolyps6|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amyjess|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] traveler01|4 years ago|reply
Gonna keep using Brave...