
Hands-on with Vivaldi, the new Web browser for power users - Heewg9
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/hands-on-with-vivaldi-the-new-web-browser-for-power-users/
======
lelf
And just about the first thing you see when trying to install it…

 _Vivaldi may collect visitor statistics. The visitor statistics may include
information about the visitors IP-addresses, usage patterns, <…>_

I guess I don't want your shiny new browser.

~~~
LLWM
It's perfectly reasonable to expect extra data to be collected when using
prerelease versions of software. Complaining about it now is premature.

~~~
e1ven
That's not a tradeoff I'm comfortable with, "even" in pre-release software.

I'm not accusing you of this, but in other cases I've seen proponents of
something say "This isn't a big deal, it's just starting out". Then, when
people continue to complain a year from now, the defenders say "This isn't a
big deal, it's always done this."

Vivaldi looks interesting, but I'd wager that there's a decent overlap between
the Power Users they're after, and the group that values their privacy the
most.

~~~
LLWM
Privacy has nothing to do with it. If the software is not yet ready, users are
expected to encounter serious bugs. Your QA department is paid to help provide
you with information to diagnose and troubleshoot those bugs, but users
aren't, so you need to collect that automatically.

------
pbowyer
This is the worst-written article I've read in a long time. It repeats itself
(forgivable), contradicts itself (unforgivable) and I'm pretty sure is
factually inaccurate in places (Doesn't Firefox already show the slowest
addons?)

In spite of that Vivaldi looks interesting, and as a long-time fan of Opera
(the original company and the browser) I wish them well.

~~~
icebraining
The claims that there aren't new browsers is wrong as well - there's many of
them, it's just that they don't have a marketing team behind them. Uzbl,
luakit, surf, jumanji, midori, vimprobable, xombrero, etc.

~~~
wanda
Well, none of those are new. Breach.cc is relatively new but even that goes
back a year. But these highly extensible vim-like microbrowsers you list
(excl. midori) have been around for years.

------
Puts
There are two things I really miss about Opera. Generic Content-blocking -
that is not only blocking ads but any URL-pattern of interest. And also the
per-site settings. For example a lot of sites use extensive javascript only
for tracking, but not for functionality visible to the user, so blocking
javascript on those sites truly improves loadtime on many sites. And also
being able to fine tune cookie settings per site.

It's such simple functionality, but really makes a huge difference both for
performance and privacy and it saddens me that Opera never will be what it
once was, and probably no other browser either. :-(

~~~
Terr_
Yeah, I want stuff like the F12 menu, and a good workflow for uses who
_whitelist_ sites for cookies, javascript, and flash.

Now, Firefox might be able to fill the void, but I doubt Chrome ever can.
Those kinds of features are an irritant to Google, because they want their
pervasive analytics, ads, and various web-apps to work out of the box.

------
austenallred
What I want from a browser:

1\. Speed 2\. Privacy 3\. Add-ons/features (and this is far below 1 and 2).

This browser collects all sorts of information (seemingly more than chrome
based on the message from instillation), and consumes an absurd amount of
memory per tab, even on plain text webpages.

There may be something promising there, but this isn't it.

~~~
lqdc13
This browser consumes about same amount as chrome in my tests. Maybe 1/5 more.

Firefox and Chrome also collect the same information, but it is an opt-in from
what I remember.

Edit:

Chrome usage with 3 tabs:
[http://i.imgur.com/mGiX0So.png](http://i.imgur.com/mGiX0So.png)

Vivaldi usage with the same tabs:
[http://i.imgur.com/ejnNzib.png](http://i.imgur.com/ejnNzib.png)

~~~
DavideNL
> Firefox and Chrome also collect the same information

Uhm, reference? I seriously doubt that...

~~~
lqdc13
Well, first from [https://vivaldi.com/privacy/](https://vivaldi.com/privacy/)
it's not clear to me whether the privacy thing applies to the browser or the
vivaldi web site.

Second, here's google chrome's privacy policy:

[https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/](https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/)

You can see that they have all kinds of information being sent to google. At
least as much as Vivaldi.

------
dragonwriter
> And since Chrome arrived in 2008, the Web hasn't seen another major browser
> launch—until now.

Lots of new browsers have launched since 2008, and Vivaldi certainly isn't a
major browser yet, if it ever will be.

~~~
nekopa
I normally respect the things you say on here, but for once, I do have to cry
"Citation". If you would be so kind, can you list some of the _lots_ of new
browsers that have been released?

~~~
dragonwriter
Not an unfair questions. Another post already listed some:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159709)

Sure, these aren't major browsers -- neither is Vivaldi, yet, and its purely
speculation that it might be in the future.

~~~
azakai
Furthermore, there is little reason to suspect Vivaldi might become major. It
brings nothing substantially new on the tech side - it's using Blink, like
Chrome and Opera, and like Opera, it only differentiates itself from Chrome on
the UI side.

Many browsers have differentiated only on the UI side; none have really
succeeded. As another example, Flock.

The 4 actually major browsers _have_ all brought major new innovations:
Firefox was a different rendering engine than IE (and much better in pretty
much every aspect, except legacy website support); Safari launched with WebKit
(a new major fork of KHTML with many improvements); Chrome in turn launched
using a major fork of WebKit (bringing process isolation and a completely new
JS engine, v8).

Vivaldi brings nothing like that to the table. It's interesting to see new UI
ideas, of course. But for the article to call it "the first new major browser
in many years" makes me immediately wonder if the author doesn't own Vivaldi
stock (which of course is not the case; but the point is that it seems
unjustifiably positive on the product).

~~~
cbd1984
Firefox was an innovation compared to IE, but it was explicitly a trimmed-down
version of Mozilla, which had existed in the form of Netscape going back what
amount to geologic eras in terms of the history of the Web.

Firefox's innovation wasn't the rendering engine, per se, but everything
surrounding it, including add-ons.

------
Elepsis
As a loyal user of Opera 5-12 (and a grudging user of the new Opera, which I
find marginally faster/less full of surprises than Chrome), I love that the
article reads like a list of old Opera 12 features that I miss.

At the same time, I'm deeply worried that they believe they have to rebuild
everything, including the mail client, to get to their first official release.
Opera had a long pattern of rough but innovative releases that took a while to
stabilize, and I can't help but believe that with them emphasizing feature
completeness _first_ , it's going to be rough for quite some time.

Given the high bar set by modern browsers I'm not sure users--power users
especially--will put up with the associated quirks long enough for Vivaldi to
gain traction.

~~~
yuhong
Still it proves that Opera 15 could have been done differently while still
remaining Chromium-based.

------
a3_nm
Where's the source? What's the license? I couldn't find this information, and
downloads seem to be binary-only.

~~~
bhassel
From some quick searching, apparently it's closed-source, but built on top of
Chromium's rendering engine (Blink).

~~~
0942v8653
Wow… why would anyone ever want to use this browser? Honestly. If it were open
source, it would at least have a _chance_.

~~~
azakai
To be fair to Vivaldi, Chrome isn't open source either, and lots of people use
it.

Chrome is of course mostly open source, except for some proprietary bits. The
same is basically true of Vivaldi (and Opera), they all add a relatively small
amount of proprietary code on top of the massive open source Chromium
codebase.

~~~
Nullabillity
AFAIK the only differences between Chromium and Chrome are:

* Preinstalled proprietary plugins (Widevine, Flash) * More preinstalled codecs (woohoo, patents!) * Various user metrics reporting

There is a pretty big difference between that and keeping all of your changes
private.

~~~
azakai
Well, for Vivaldi and Opera, "all of your changes" in this case amounts to
just the UI. Neither has the capability nor motivation to modify Blink in any
significant way.

Also, Opera has been contributing to Blink, so they aren't keeping all their
changes private.

Vivaldi hasn't launched yet, but I would guess the same would be true of them
- it just isn't rational to do otherwise (if Vivaldi fixes some small bug in
Blink, why keep it as a patch they need to constantly reapply on top of Blink?
Far easier to upstream it).

So aside from the UI (which is tiny compared to the entire browser), Chrome,
Blink and Vivaldi are about equal in terms of being open or closed.

~~~
Pistos2
But everything beyond Blink/Webkit is precisely what I'm interested in
viewing, contributing to, and wanting the FLOSS community to be able to audit
and alter, etc. etc.

I was a pretty die-hard Opera fan for many years, so this news really piqued
my interest... up until I learned the software is not libre.

------
Mithaldu
As someone who tried using it: There's nothing about this for power users.
Even with an absolutely minimal website, it consumes ~20mb per tab.

~~~
emodendroket
I imagine "power users" probably have more than 2GB of RAM.

~~~
icebraining
But also much more programs competing for it - I have 6GB on my work laptop,
and I'm constantly at 95%+ (not counting cache!).

~~~
munchhausen
This needs to be said - upgrade your RAM. If your device doesn't support a
memory upgrade, get one that does.

Upgrading my laptop to 32GB RAM was one of those things where you wish you had
done it a lot earlier. No more OOM-killers, no more things grinding to a halt
because the box is swapping (in fact, I disabled swap altogether), no more
checking memory utilisation before starting a beefy VM.

Just smooth sailing all along.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, until the next release of Chrome and Firefox, where GMail and Facebook
together will start to happily eat 16GB of your 32. The amount of memory
browsers now eat up is insane.

------
hjst
It's worth noting that there is already an open source browser project to
recreate + extend the Opera 12 UI: Otter Browser

[http://otter-browser.org/](http://otter-browser.org/)

------
shpx
Let me know when Vivaldi implements vimperator style link selection and I'll
try it. Otherwise if you have to click Firefox+vimperator or
palemoon+pentadactyl will always be the true powerusers browser

~~~
sergiotapia
Vim users are a niche within a niche. Not all developers use Vim or care.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because not all developers are power users - but this browser is supposedly
aimed at those of us who are.

~~~
JadeNB
Even as a vim devotee, I think that the suggestion that "power user" implies
"vim user" is incorrect at best, and offensive at worst.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Of course. It implies "vim _or_ emacs users".

------
TheMagicHorsey
Why can't they have stacked tabs and web page notes while using the Blink
renderer? Saying that dropping Presto made those features go away doesn't make
any sense to me. Its not like the Browser is built using its own renderer. The
web renderer renders into the area of the tab ... the rest of the browser
functionality exists outside that real-estate--and should be independent of
the renderer.

------
ljoshua
I loved and used Opera as my main browser back in the day, flicking back and
forth between pages with right-mouse-button gestures and reading my email in-
browser before Gmail. What a fantastic browser it was! I am excited to see the
Vivaldi project mature and hope to be able to evaluate it once it is more
complete.

------
Theodores
I gave Vivaldi a go because I wanted to speed up the testing of a website
'logged in' (with Chrome) and 'not logged in' (with Vivaldi). Vivaldi was
notionally perfect for that with the same F12 tools as Chrome. I could delete
session cookies and do my testing with it, no learning required.

So I would say I have given it a fair shot. But what browser am I using now?
Chrome. Sometimes when you want to get something done you don't need to find
that the maximise/minimise buttons are somewhere different, and with
Ubuntu/Unity + Vivaldi they are - 90's style, in the top-right hand side.

I was actually a late convert to Chrome, for a long time I 'needed' Firebug
and found the Chrome F12 tools to be inferior, or with a learning hurdle. With
Vivaldi there is no leap of re-learning required, but, it doesn't have
anything extra that I _need_ for the day job. A regular incognito window does
all I need for testing, with the UX chrome in the expected places. Note I also
have the indispensable 'Hover Zoom' and 'Vim bindings'.

~~~
byte1918
I really, really, really want to like Firebug/Firefox but it's just impossible
for me. I already tried to switch 2 times this year. Once with the FFDev and
once with v36 (stable) - both times I was left just as disappointed. I open
the developer tools and refresh a SharePoint page and the browser hangs for
close to 1 minute - this is just unacceptable. Even IE doesn't have this
hiccups. I know this isn't common and is only reproducible on v36 for me but
it's a huge PIA. Other than this, I'm curious why do you say the chrome
developer tools are inferior? I haven't used firebug in a while but AFAIK
Chrome Dev Tools has most of it's features and since it's "native" it's
smother and faster.

~~~
michaelbuddy
Try it while not logged into SharePoint. My experience when SharePoint is
logged its not exactly lean.

------
c3RlcGhlbnI_
Why did they keep the built in mail client of all things? Fighting opera to
get it to use my mail and RSS clients was the worst part of my experience with
the browser.

If you want to make a customizable browser, give us the option to not install
such unnecessary addons. The browser already seems to use as much memory as
chrome, it does not need to waste any more.

~~~
forthefuture
This is something I don't really understand about the idea of a "power"
browser. The entire reason browsers cut back on features was bloat that 99% of
users never use. I guess targeting that 1% makes the bloat more reasonable,
but for anyone who wants one feature and not another, it's easier to start at
0 with Chrome or Firefox and add the one thing you want.

~~~
lmkg
On the other hand, the reason that Firefox got a reputation for being slow,
bloated, and leaky was because 90% of the features were written by third-party
developers with varying levels of competency, no quality controls, and little
incentive to bring their stuff up to date.

I used Opera pre-12, and the reason I did so was because all of the features
that I wanted were baked-in to the browser, which meant that they went through
the same quality controls and integration testing as the rest of the browser.
There was no separate step of updating add-ons, or even worse having outdated
add-ons with no compatible version. Everything Just Worked.

Granted, some of the features were not as feature-complete as comparable
Firefox add-ons. E.g., tab-stacking is strictly inferior to tree-style tabs
because there is only one level of collapse. But everything I wanted was
already included, at an acceptable-enough level that for me, it outweighed the
cost of having to comparison-shop for mouse gestures or custom CSS solutions
or whatever.

FWIW, Opera never felt "bloated" to me. It had crop-tons of features, but for
whatever reason that didn't translate to a feeling of bloat. The browser was
fast and responsive, and the pile of features never really got in my way.
Every once in a while, I would read about an interesting Firefox add-on, dig
into the Options menu, and find out Opera had the feature all along, whereupon
I would drag it onto the UI.

Personally I like having the email built-in to the browser because it means I
don't have to context-switch to see the status of my inbox. But that's a
personal quirk.

------
m_mueller
I was using Opera heavily until about 6-7 years ago when the compatibility
just became too bad. The feature I miss most is the keyboard shortcuts (which
this seems to have) and 'fast forward'. This was a neat feature for paged
sites where the browser would try to parse the site for 'next page' links,
preload it and when you hit the fast forward button it would show it
immediately. Worked great in all kinds of user forums and photo albums back in
the day - although granted, there's much less paged content nowadays. I used
to put back, forward and fast forward on the 'z,', 'x' and 'c' keys, sort of
similar to vim (although I was never a vim user). It really felt like being in
total control of your browser and having the web at your fingertips.

------
dghf
> even the ability to render a page with monospace fonts if you want.

Is there any major browser that _doesn 't_ allow you to do this?

~~~
detaro
In Opera you could quickly change these things for the current page in the
menu. I don't think that is possible in Chrome or Firefox.

------
dredmorbius
Not really my style (I'm a vim guy), but for power-user browsers, there's
conkeror. Webkit rendering, emacs commandline.

[http://conkeror.org/](http://conkeror.org/)

(I mostly use it as a frequently-wiped-configs-and-cache bare rendering test.)

------
mrmondo
I don't personally see whats so exciting about this, it really doesn't tick
any of the boxes for anything I'd want in a browser (as a 'power user'), this
just reminds me how much I dislike Javascript.

------
getsat
I got this prompt when I opened HN in Vivaldi:
[http://i.imgur.com/HKMLXQD.png](http://i.imgur.com/HKMLXQD.png)

When I click the ?, nothing happens. Any idea what this is?

~~~
r3bl
My guess is that they want to use your password manager for Chrome to allow
you to login to HN.

------
jray319
"The problem is bad enough that a future version of Firefox will even have a
feature dedicated to letting you know which of your add-ons is slowing you
down."

Does anyone know this feature of Firefox?

~~~
discreditable
It's in Nightly. I've seen it a few times. It appears as a bar across the
bottom of your screen telling you x addon may be causing this page to load
slowly. From there you have the option to disable the addon, ignore the
message, or ignore permanently. I saw it for uBlock, HTTPSEverywhere, and
reddit enhancement suite, and amazonsmile redirect. In each scenario I felt it
was well worth the tradeoff to run a little more slowly.

~~~
Dylan16807
Worth noting that it's set to be hypersensitive right now for testing. Don't
trust it for much of anything yet.

~~~
agumonkey
Good to know, I was starting to think either noscript/ublock were badly
written, badly integrated or that Firefox had deep issues.

------
mohakraaj
I installed it, but crashes every time I try to open it.

------
fapjacks
It's not open source enough for me. No thanks.

------
andyidsinga
"first there was ie and Firefox"...

holy crap I am old ...cello anyone? :|

------
toothbrush
Their website needs Javascript to load. Ugh. I hope that's not an indicator
for the rest of their philosophy.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't understand why there are still people persisting in disabling
JavaScript when the vast majority of Web sites today have significant
functionality degradation or just plain won't work without it.

~~~
marssaxman
The vast majority of web sites are crap. I'd really rather default disable
javascript and opt-in if I decide I want to allow their code to run on my
machine.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This. It's not really about tracking. Most of the websites embed tons of JS
for no good reason, just because developers are lazy fashionistas and
designers wouldn't be able to justify their pay if they didn't add tons of
unneccessary bells and whistles.

There are web _applications_ that need JavaScript, and I'm fine with that.
There's lot of cool stuff JS could be used for, and it's not used - check out
Bret Victor's explorable explanations. But instead doing something useful with
this power, web designers and developers just use JS to make "shitty
skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking
message" \- as the quote from a very insightful article goes[0].

[0] - [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

