
Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends - matthberg
https://vivaldi.com/
======
StevePerkins
I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it's coming along, and there
are some things that I like. However, I think they're a bit TOO fixated on
Opera as it was 15 years ago.

I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature
rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources
into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature
feature of Opera back in the day. However, it's probably no exaggeration to
say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade. So
why is such a retro throwback feature prioritized so high?

Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab.
Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the
focus in the tab you're currently on. However, Vivaldi automatically jumps the
focus over to that tab right away... because that was default Opera behavior
15 years ago. This is frequently brought up in Vivaldi forums, and the
response from the devs is simply to grumble that old-school Opera was best and
all other browsers today have bad defaults.

I'm a huge Opera fan, and have been for years. However, the thing is... I just
don't WANT a re-implementation of Opera from 15 years ago. I'm sorry, but
desktop email is dead for most of us. I'm sorry, but Chrome has acclimated us
to some slightly different default behaviors, and at this point those are the
defaults that I expect and want other browsers to mirror.

You want to enable a whole new level of customization for power users? That
sounds AWESOME! You want to provide some security and an alternative path
forward, for Opera fans who worry about that company's ownership changes?
Great! But please don't be so beholden to the Opera of 2002 that you don't
make an offering well-suited for 2017.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Almost everyone I know using email for business uses a desktop client -
usually Mac Mail, sometimes thunderbird.

A new client that isn't quite so neglected would be very welcome.

~~~
morganvachon
Another use case is someone like me. I absolutely love Fastmail's web client,
it's better than any other web client I've used including Gmail. However, I
also have a few email addresses for domains that I own, and I don't want to
deal with clunky forwarding; I prefer to use them as-is. For those it's much,
much easier to use a good desktop client rather than set up and maintain
Roundcube or even SquirrelMail on my servers.

Windows 10's Mail app is not quite up to the task; it's fine for Outlook.com
webmail but I need something much more powerful on Windows without having to
buy Outlook proper (on Linux this obviously isn't an issue, there is a wealth
of good desktop email clients for X and the console). So far I've been doing
well with Thunderbird, but I'm tempted to give Vivaldi a shot since I was
always a fan of Opera's email integration.

------
cyberferret
I've been using Vivaldi now for over a year (since early beta days), and
finding it a great experience.

A couple of things I really like - (1) that the browser chrome changes to suit
the colour scheme of the website that you have loaded when flicking through
tabs. Makes it really easy to identify what site you are on especially if you
have scrolled down past the header. (2) that they have a slider on the bottom
toolbar for zooming in/out of websites. For this old guy with failing
eyesight, that is a killer feature that I use all the time.

Happy to also see that the number of sites reporting "You are not using an
approved browser" has reduced to nearly 0 when browsing via Vivaldi, but that
is more a problem for lazy web designers who only create sites specifically
for a particular rendering engine, I guess.

EDIT: Interesting Observation - I remember that in the early days, their main
selling point was their command line functionality for power users. That was
what made me change over back then, although ironically I never ever use their
CLI tool set at all these days, and just use the mouse like always.

I note that they have downplayed the CLI functionality on their current
website, so perhaps it wasn't such a drawcard for other users either?!?

~~~
BuuQu9hu
> Makes it really easy to identify what site you are on especially if you have
> scrolled down past the header.

You find using browser chrome color is easier than using URL bar for
identifying the site?

~~~
cyberferret
LOL, next you'll be saying that we should replace coloured traffic lights with
black and white "STOP" and "GO" signs?

I'd suggest you do a Google search on the human ability to discern colour as
an indicator _way_ faster than reading text. Especially if on the peripheral
vision outside of direct line of sight. NASA and USAF research papers on
layouts of aircraft/spacecraft instrumentation etc. too might be helpful to
you.

Real world example - Right now, as I type this in another browser in the
foreground, my Vivaldi browser is 80% obscured by this window, but I can tell
by the right edge of the window colour that the currently active tab on it is
my Google Mail.

~~~
setasors
> I'd suggest you do a Google search

> on the human ability to discern colour

> as an indicator way faster than reading text.

"In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the
reaction time of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., "blue", "green", or
"red") is printed in a color that is not denoted by the name (e.g., the word
"red" printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word
takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink
matches the name of the color.

...

This is based on the idea that word processing is significantly faster than
color processing."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect)

~~~
davidp
Interesting, true; but then repeat the experiment with your peripheral vision.

------
Jonsvt
Glad you like our browser. We are working hard to continue to add really
useful features, cool stuff and more flexibility. Our philosophy is that we
all deserve a browser that works in the way we want it to. This means we
listen to input and gradually add the features and options you want.

Cheers, Jon of Vivaldi

~~~
terrestrial
Hi Jon!

I know you are a stand-up guy [0]. Have you considered working with the free
software community to create a truly free and modern browser?

No-one trusts Chromium since it's filled with Google-specific bits and tweaks,
even analytics. Assuming you've trimmed all of that away, releasing your add-
ons as free software (e.g. GPL or BSD) would create some real traction around
Vivaldi as a browser alternative.

This also avoids the "Opera mistake". If Presto had been open sourced, it
would still be alive and kicking today. With Blink things are different, and I
don't see how keeping a proprietary user interface is going to sustain a
browser company.

Suggestion: make the core browser slim, pluggable and free, and sell
extensions and infrastructure parts necessary for sync, updates etc with a GPL
and/or proprietary license.

Oh, and [0]: [https://i.imgur.com/UFh2M.png](https://i.imgur.com/UFh2M.png)

~~~
Tomis02
I knew which picture it was before i even opened it :) the Opera community
used to be so amazing.

------
Al-Khwarizmi
As an old Opera user I really want to like Vivaldi, but the weird titlebar
without title and especially the non-native menubar really turn me off (in a
native menubar under Windows, once you click a menu, you can just move your
mouse without clicking to navigate the rest of the menus. In Vivaldi's
menubar, you can't, making the menus _way_ clunkier to navigate). For this
reason, I actually find the experience of Otter Browser ([http://www.otter-
browser.org/](http://www.otter-browser.org/)) to be closer to Opera's than
that of Vivaldi: even if Otter is more bare-bones in terms of functionality,
it really gets the efficient UX feel better. I encourage old Opera fans to
check it out as well.

I hope the Vivaldi team fixes these so I can really like it. Some of my
previous turnoffs (like lack of "click tab to minimize") were implemented so
I'm hopeful... although not _too_ hopeful because this menu implementation has
been there for quite long so they don't seem to take the menubar too
seriously.

~~~
Aoyagi
I was asking for a proper native title bar possibly a year ago since I'm using
the "classic" Windows theme and that's just ideal. It doesn't take up much
space and it shows the whole page title.

[http://puu.sh/tcYJ7/b7479e05cd.png](http://puu.sh/tcYJ7/b7479e05cd.png)

~~~
atlemo
Have you seen this setting? Apperance -> Window Appearance -> Use Native
Window
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4ew5ptyusm4cjb/Screenshot%202017-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4ew5ptyusm4cjb/Screenshot%202017-01-06%2012.27.41.png?dl=0)

You can also choose between horizontal menu on top, or "Vivaldi Menu" in the
top left.

~~~
fredoralive
Doesn't work properly on Windows, you just just get a blank title bar with
only the window controls at right (not even the window icon / menu on the left
appears).

Does work correctly on Mac OS though.

------
lsh
I switched to Vivaldi as my default browser 6+ months ago after new-Opera
became such an overwhelming disappointment I felt I had to abandon what it had
become after fifteen or more years of use. Vivaldi _definitely_ has the old
Opera spirit, but not the performance. On original Opera I could have hundreds
of tabs open, in Vivaldi I can have 60? not such a big deal, right!? well it's
partly that, partly just a constant reminder that software has become horribly
inefficient even with scads of system resources - Opera always felt extremely
small and efficient. Vivaldi feels big and heavy like emacs (that I also love
and use) but less performant.

I feel that came off negatively! Vivaldi is a _fantastic_ modern browser.

On Arch: yaourt -S vivaldi-snapshot

~~~
ploxiln
I fear this is largely due to modern websites. If you used old Opera on modern
websites they would be broken (lack of new features) and still pretty slow.

JS and image sizes have gone up exponentially. I remember discussion on
Slashdot a decade ago about average page size going above 100KB - now the
average is easily into multiple megabytes. It "works fine" in chrome on a
macbook pro so who gives fuck, right? We can't go back to an older web - we
can't get off this train, and we can't slow it down, it's inexorably pulled
forward by market mechanisms way bigger than we are.

~~~
netsharc
And nowadays* Chrome unloads "old" tabs from memory, which must be a
frustrating user experience for low memory users, open something in a new tab,
try to go to the previous tab, and the browser had to load it again.

* Maybe they've fixed this

Of course it all works on the developer's machine, it has 16GB RAM, full HD
screen and a connection straight to the backbone...

~~~
ajmurmann
Well. To be fair the developer is upset that the MacBook pro doesn't come with
32GB RAM.

------
binarycrusader
So what's the business model here? This is a "free" product, so how does
Vivaldi intend to ensure its continued existence?

~~~
vortico
I'm wondering this too. Mozilla has tons of sponsorship from Yahoo and others.
Google invests in Chrome to give them leverage for their own products. Since
Vivaldi is closed source, how do I know they aren't selling my data?

~~~
ymse
Vivaldi is allegedly free software:
[https://vivaldi.com/source/](https://vivaldi.com/source/)

~~~
vortico
Looks like you're right. The original Vivaldi code is a BSD-style license, and
although I didn't check all the dependencies, it seems to be mostly Chromium +
lots of original code.

------
npace12
As a web developer using chrome and emacs all day, I was very skeptical.
Decided to give it a try and looks really good so far. It's got a lot of the
good chrome stuff and so far I haven't found absolutely anything I miss.

So far I really like:

\- Ctrl-P-like tab switcher / command thingy

\- fast (but that may be just how different new browsers always feel like at
first)

\- the web page size indicator on the address bar

\- tabs can be configured to be wherever the hell i want them

\- the regular, good chrome debugger

\- can run chrome extensions straight from the store

I don't know who the devs are and how long this browser will be around for,
but it's seriously well done!

Set as default.

~~~
aquadrop
Developers of Vivaldi used to work on Opera browser.

~~~
Jonsvt
Thank you for your kind words about Vivaldi.

I was the co-founder of Opera and now co-founder of Vivaldi. A big part of the
team is former Opera people. We are based in Norway and Iceland, mostly, with
team members in a couple of other locations.

~~~
aquadrop
Thank you for the Opera, it was my primary browser for a number of years. And
good luck to you with your new endeavor, you certainly have some right ideas
in Vivaldi :)

~~~
Jonsvt
Thanks. We aim to please. :)

There is a lot more cool stuff in the pipeline. :)

------
fredoralive
Vivaldi is frustrating, as it nearly implements all the bits of Opera I use,
but there are odd bits where it falls short

The main thing for me is the fact that tab minimisation doesn't work
correctly, sometimes tabs you've minimised get selected, sometimes even when
there are unminimised tabs. It's just wrong, and the tab handling was one of
the main reasons I used Opera

Beyond that there's a lack of a bookmark menu, the fact that toolbars aren't
customisable, no click-to-active for plugins and no site preferences, but
they're less important things that don't mess up my workflow as much. Also
it's rather ugly, but I fear we'll have to wait for several more years before
flat design goes out of fashion to fix that.

I really want to get rid of my current Firefox + a load of extensions setup,
especially as I haven't a clue if it'll survive Mozilla's next round of
extension breaking updates. But Vivaldi just isn't quite there yet. I really
want it to be...

~~~
Aoyagi
One of the most frustrating things for me is the lack of Dragonfly...

~~~
bigbugbag
and live editing of html source from cache.

------
CoryG89
A lot more interesting information on the Wikipedia page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_\(web_browser\))

Looks like it uses Blink engine, first release was 8 months ago. Looks like
you can also use Chrome extensions with it.

~~~
matthberg
I was blown away by the customizability, I used Firefox with a split tab
extension, yet this has native support.

~~~
nhumrich
Unfortunately you can't resize the split. I almost never want an exact 50-50
split. One webpage always scales better then the other in split mode.

~~~
StavrosK
You guys need to rotate your screen 90 degrees.

------
kome
For context: behind Vivaldi there is part of the original Opera team. Vivaldi
indeed really resemble to Opera 12: and that's awesome. But they are using
Blink instead of the defunct Presto.

------
anw
I've used Vivaldi as my primary (Chrome as secondary) browser the past 3
months (along using Vivaldi.net as my e-mail address – thank you for offering
this, Vivaldi team).

I love the browser so far, and think it deserves many accolades for what it
has and is attempting to accomplish. I do run into the occasional issues that
remind me this is a newer browser, though. Mostly these are only noticeable
because they completely break your concentration from what you were doing.

For instance, if you attempt to bookmark the current page but realize you want
to put it in a new folder, then you'll have to break your flow of bookmarking
by going to the Bookmarks page, create the folder, then go back to page again
to add it to the newly created folder.

Right-clicking on a link and opening in a new tab will immediately take you to
that new tab, even if you wanted to save it for after you finished the current
page. There may be a chrome setting for this, but a cursory glance at the
preferences window didn't show any kind of wording that would indicate "open
new tab in background".

The only main gripe I really have is in retrieving saved passwords. Yes, I can
put the URL directly into the bar and go there that way, but it's an
inconvenience I don't have to deal with in Chrome (or Firefox).

Even with these few issues, Vivaldi has been my favorite browser these past
months, and I can't wait to see how it matures.

------
emptyfile
Been using it for 6 months now and I love it. Verticals tabs were literally
the only thing keeping me on Firefox.

Love the search bar which splits suggestions into Typed, Bookmarks, History
categories.

So many great details and customization features in this browser.

~~~
mistermann
It still doesn't nest tabs like Tree-Style tabs addin for FF though right?
When they get that I'll switch at least part time, FF for me is getting so
laggy (due to inefficient JS on certain websites like twitter) it is extremely
painful to use.

EDIT:

[https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3255/tree-style-
tab/16](https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3255/tree-style-tab/16)

One page 4:

[https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3255/tree-style-
tab/67](https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3255/tree-style-tab/67)

"I do know that internally, there is discussion as to various ways TST might
be implemented. Nothing has been settled on, but there is discussion."

~~~
phowat
You can stack tabs in Vivaldi. It's pretty similar, good enough for me. One
thing I miss from firefox is the tab groups feature though.

------
thecrumb
Would switch to this immediately but it still doesn't support any sort of
sync. People use browsers on multiple devices these days. Not sure why this
isn't a priority for the Vivaldi team?

~~~
Jonsvt
This is a priority for sure. We are getting there.

~~~
StavrosK
Can I point out that we want to have our cake and eat it too? I really really
want password sync, but I also really don't want you to know any of my
passwords. This is going to be hard for you to pull off successfully. How are
you planning to achieve it?

------
EugeneOZ
Hope they will not repeat fatal error of Opera - closed bug-tracker.

------
wallacoloo
Coming from Firefox, it's got a very nice default UI - I love the loading
animations and such. It seems easy to customize, though puzzlingly the icons
don't seem to be themeable even though colors, address bar appearance, etc are
- which is a bummer because the default icons are ugly Windows 8-style/Metro
things.

Also, it seems to be implementing its own scrollbars that are stylized
differently than _everything else_ on my computer. Firefox also uses my GTK
theme for things like checkboxes, etc (right out of the box), which is pretty
cool. Vivaldi's doing some cool things, but it's still got a ways to go.

------
notduncansmith
How is Vivaldi's power consumption and memory footprint? Those were the
biggest motivators to switch from Chrome to Safari on macOS for most browsing
(I still use Chrome for some front-end dev stuff). I can browse the web
forever with Safari on my 2012 MacBook Air, Chrome not so much (haven't tried
FF as a daily driver in ages so would love to hear about it too).

Off-topic aside: is power consumption even a concern for engineers these days?
Looking at what's possible with technologies that are somewhat fringe, it's
hard not to think about how much power we're gobbling up that we really don't
need.

------
digi_owl
One thing i like about Vivaldi is that i can set a whole UI scaling factor.
Because this makes it easy to adapt for touch input (just crank the factor up
until the elements are of a practical size).

Just wish it didn't have frequent issues with touch screens on my Windows
tablet, leading to it not responding to any input until i switch to different
window and back.

Also, it never seems able to bring up the on-screen keyboard when tapping
input areas on sites. But it comes up (unless the previously mentioned
unresponsiveness kicks in) when tapping the url field.

------
xkxx
I'd become your friend if your browser became open source.

------
asimjalis
Just installed it. Reading this on Vivaldi. Looks great so far.

------
kevinSuttle
Just gonna leave this here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830326)

------
segphault
There are a ton of great ideas in Vivaldi's user interface. And it's built on
Chrome, so you still get all the standards and extension compatibility. They
regularly add clever new features that materially improve tab management and
navigation. I'm looking forward to making it my default browser at some point
in the future when they add sync for bookmarks etc.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
No source, no deal.

~~~
dchest
There's this: [https://vivaldi.com/source/](https://vivaldi.com/source/)
(don't know what's inside)

~~~
m45t3r
AFAIK, this is mostly Chromium and their patches. The interface itself (that
is mostly build in something similar to Electron, i.e. JavaScript, CSS and
HTML) is completely closed source.

------
reformedjuju
Until proper mobile sync comes about for passwords and bookmarks I'm going to
have to stick to Safari, unfortunately.

------
gkya
I could've given it a try if it was opensource. But because it's closed I
immediately classify it as vaporware, and as the browser is one of the two
centers of my daily computing (the other being emacs), I won't invest in
vaporware. I believe that opensourcing is the best choice of the company
behind this.

~~~
joshuata
The source is available at
[https://vivaldi.com/source/?lang=en_US](https://vivaldi.com/source/?lang=en_US)

~~~
gkya
What about the licence? There are five-six xz'ed tarballs there, each ~600
MBs.

~~~
bigbugbag
Copyright 2017 Vivaldi Technologies AS. All rights reserved.

1\. This End User License Agreement ("EULA") governs your use ("You") of the
browser software in executable form ("Software") and any ancillary services
("Services") provided to You by Vivaldi Technology AS ("Vivaldi") to the
exclusion of all other terms and conditions. Source code used in the Software,
under open source license agreements, can be obtained at
[https://vivaldi.com/source](https://vivaldi.com/source).

------
warcode
Been using Vivaldi for probably a year, but I am now looking for a new
browser. Too many media/crash issues have started popping up with running the
browser without hardware acceleration enabled. And the options that let me
disable it in the first place have been removed.

I guess all I really want is chrome without the tracking.

~~~
bigbugbag
What you want is iron, which was available since pretty much the early day of
chrome.

here:
[https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php](https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php)
and this:
[https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iro...](https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php)

You could also have a look at epic over there:
[https://www.epicbrowser.com/](https://www.epicbrowser.com/)

------
NKCSS
First time I heard or used Vivaldi; the whole 2-panels in 1 browser chrome
side by side looked interesting, but using it, docking/undocking tabs and
resizeing the area's just feels very slow, especially when you're used to how
snappy Google Chrome feels. Too bad because I want to like this :)

~~~
ankka
This is a sad problem that has come with developers using Javascript for
everything. Development might be faster, but the end product is simply slow
even on high-end machines.

Same thing happens with Visual Studio Code, Brackets and Atom when compared to
Sublime Text, for instance.

------
silliaris
I really like Vivaldi, but I cannot use it as my main browser because I really
miss browser synchronization. With Chrome, I have everything synchronized, so
setting up my browser environment I'm used to on new computer takes just few
clicks. I hope Vivaldi will have this too soon.

------
spacehacker
Is it possible to arrange the tabs in the side bar in a hierarchical list
view? It seems it is possible to make stacks of tabs, but the individual tabs
in the hover menu are not very accessible IMHO ("out of sight, out of mind").
Otherwise this browser looks really nice.

~~~
matthberg
Vivaldi uses chrome extensions, if there's one that would provide that, it
looks like it can be used.

------
msimpson
Waits patiently for the mail client.

------
tscs37
One thing that always turns me off is the lack of proper popup support (last I
checked).

Some addons I like don't like that and that one website I need for studying
doesn't like it any more either.

But otherwise it's a solid browser.

------
0wl3x
Is it bad to say at this point I've spent so much time with Chrome that I am
not interested in switching? Things work well for me.

------
known
I've decided to roll out and use my own browser;

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" \--Isaac
Newton

------
chrisper
My only concern is that it does not have settings / history sync yet.

~~~
cyberferret
But that will mean that you probably have to set up an account with
Vivaldi.com, similar to how you have to do it on Google.com for Chrome.

Personally, I like not having to remember yet another set of login credentials
for every app I use. Perhaps if they supported syncing of browser setups via
DropBox, G-Drive etc. then it may be a way to (a) backup your browser settings
in one place and (b) share it among your devices or even among work
colleagues.

------
vermaden
No FreeBSD support. No go.

------
cphoover
aren't we kinda passed the days of closed source browsers?

~~~
jhasse
Safari and Edge are closed-source, Google Chrome (not Chromium) is too, in
some way.

~~~
bigbugbag
I wonder in which way chrome is not proprietary. AFAIK it is 100% proprietary
freeware, at least this my understanding of the legal terms in the ToS / EULA:
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/eula_t...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/eula_text.html)

~~~
jhasse
In the way that you can build a very similar version of it (Chromium) from
source code released under OSS licenses. You can't do that with Edge, Safari
or Vivaldi.

------
bobsgame
Vivaldi is awesome! Thank you Vivaldi team!

------
lawnchair_larry
Uh oh. They made the browser mistake.

~~~
jdormit
Care to elaborate?

~~~
erwinkle
They made the browser mistake, which part do you need elaborated?

~~~
Gabriel_Martin
This is part of the team behind Opera. Sounds like they have the chops

