
Vivaldi Is Quickly Becoming the Alternative Browser to Beat - kagonman
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/08/vivaldi-chrome-alternative-tech-preview-2/
======
ebbv
We've seen a lot of these press releases reprinted as articles about Vivaldi
this week, but despite their claims more features != catering to power users.

I'm a web developer, I spend at least 10 hours a day in a web browser. Usually
several of them. Usually with several windows spread across several desktops,
and a large number of tabs in each window. If you want to appeal to me, use
resources efficiently. So far every metric I've seen of Vivaldi shows it is a
memory hog.

They tout the idea that the browser comes with features which are only
available as extensions in other browsers. That's not a feature. The browser
should come with only absolutely essential features and the rest _should_ be
extensions. I don't want my browser bloated with a ton of features I'll never
use, and neither does somebody else who likes a different feature set than me.
By trying to cater to everyone at once, you're actually making your product
terrible for everyone.

------
joshuapants
I'm fairly impressed with Vivaldi and I appreciate its roots greatly. I'm just
a bit uncomfortable with its proprietary nature. I'm not a free software
zealot, but I do make the effort to use free software when I can.

Not quite the same category, but if anyone is interested in a modern Opera-
alike browser check out Otter : [https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-
browser](https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser)

Their main website isn't loading for me at the moment (edit: must have been
the network I was on, I'm connected to a different one now and it loads fine),
but you can get a good deal of info from the Github. It's under active
development and while I wouldn't replace Firefox with it yet I may very well
at some point.

~~~
thunderbong
Vivaldi is free. It's just not open source.

~~~
joshuapants
Vivaldi doesn't cost money. That is not the same thing as being free.
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)

------
Mithaldu
Windows 7

Vivaldi 1.0.118.19 (Developer Build)

Empty startup: 217 MB

Tab with [http://redwolf.de](http://redwolf.de) : 28 MB Tab with
[https://github.com/wchristian/Microidium](https://github.com/wchristian/Microidium)
: 41 MB

Every new tab opened takes at least 28 MB, and pages with higher complexity
use more. The progression is linear.

Simply put, they can put in as many features as they like, if they don't get
the memory use in check, it'll be even less of an alternative.

However, since it is based on Blink, they're stuck with the memory profile of
the exact same rendering engine as in Chrome/Opera 15, and can barely
differentiate themselves by providing a different UI.

This is just the same thing as 10 years ago when everyone was making
"browsers" based on an iexplore engine webview. As much as i want someone to
take up the baton of Opera 12, this is not done by repeating the mistake Opera
ASA did and forking Chromium.

~~~
mikhailt
The memory usage doesn't seem that bad for a modern browser that sandboxes
each tab.

How do you suppose they reduce the memory consumption for each tab without
being able to reuse many of the content between tabs?

------
bauer
Great to see Vivaldi getting traction and attention. I did not agree with the
direction Opera was taken after they switched from the Presto rendering engine
to Blink. Many of the features focused on power users were thrown out, and
when users complained to Opera, they were told to wait on extension developers
to fill in the gaps. Many people prefer not to have to install multiple
extensions and therefore have to trust multiple extension developers. I hope
Vivaldi is successful in filling the void left by the changes to Opera.

------
rcarmo
I have to say that I tried Vivaldi a couple of weeks ago and found it too
alien and unintuitive for my taste, both on the Mac and under Ubuntu.

In comparison, "mainline" Opera is (at least for me) not just faster than
Chrome, but also refreshingly free of bundled crap (including Google logins
and the like).

