
Vivaldi browser v1.8 released, with calendar-style browsing history - jonmccull
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-makes-history/
======
jorams
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.

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

~~~
newman314
Let's expand that further.

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.

~~~
amjith
There is a chrome extension for that:
[https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon](https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon)

~~~
newman314
This looks interesting. Thanks.

Other use cases that I have are:

* I want to be able search all content & comments of HN submissions that I have either upvoted or saved.

* Want to search all the content of items saved in Pocket

------
arianvanp
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

~~~
mtgx
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.

[https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Brave is _awful_. It removes ads on websites and replaces them with their own
ads, which is incredibly unethical. Please, please don't use it.

~~~
jpttsn
It's about as unethical as removing the packaging from groceries and serving
them on your own plates.

~~~
lucideer
False equivalent.

Using your analogical line of reasoning, the equivalent would be stealing the
groceries from a supermarket and replacing them with your own. I don't think
Brave's proposed (but apparently never implemented) ad-replacement was quite
this bad, but analogies are never very accurate.

~~~
jpttsn
I like my analogy.

I buy the food (content) and get the branded packaging (ads)

I then serve the same food, replacing the branded packaging with my own
plates.

My dinner guests will give me credit for the plates, instead of giving
eyeballs to the original branded packaging.

~~~
lucideer
Honestly, I need to retract my above comment completely. You're absolutely
right.

The fact it took a second explanation/clarification is a pretty good insight
into how accepting we've become of advertising as a thing tbh.

------
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
abrowne
Mozilla had a recent project (Tofino) to experiment with browser interfaces,
and one of their conclusions was

"Boy howdy do normal users have hard time with non-conventional browser
interfaces!" [https://medium.com/project-tofino/re-defining-the-tofino-
pro...](https://medium.com/project-tofino/re-defining-the-tofino-
project-6d3c98521cc8)

~~~
dragonwriter
You really need to both do longer studies and include (and distinguish in
analysis) new vs. experienced browser users to separate out short-term
familiarity effects from long-term usability.

~~~
anigbrowl
Agreed. If there's a benefit to the new interface people can adapt fair
quickly. Videogames deal with this challenge as a matter of course.

------
nonsince
> 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.

~~~
napoleoncomplex
It might be paranoid from the aspect of history, but this is something that I
definitely noticed with the URL bar when moving from Firefox to Chrome.

Chrome will often offer the first result as a search query, instead of a
website I visited before. Feels very clear that it's a big part of their
business model. Firefox is much more aggressive in serving history URLs. If I
type "videos" in Firefox, it will give me "reddit.com/r/videos" as the first
result, since I've been there plenty of times, but Chrome insists on offering
the first result as a generic Google query for "videos".

Related sidenote, Firefox was also way superior in remembering which letters I
type to go to which site in a more broad way. Chrome does it on a very basic
level, prioritizing the sites that have the same string on the top level
domain. Example, if I type "news" Chrome is always going to offer me sites
that begin with "news" such as "news.ycombinator.com", even if I more often
end up going to "randomsite.com/news" or "randomsite.com" whose page title is
"News!" when typing that. Firefox remembers my preference, which means that
after a few days of Firefox use, I'll have a bunch of 2 letter combos that
take me to the exact site I want ("ne" to Hacker News, "vi" to reddit videos,
"ap" to an apartment listing website which has "ap somewhere deep in their
URL, or just in the title of the website, etc.), while Chrome will only give
me top level URLs, and feels as useless on week 10 as it did on week 1. For
sites where I don't remember the URL, I'll usually end up googling the page
title in Chrome, while Firefox would serve me exactly what I need from
history.

Part of all of that is just shit UX on Chrome's part, but it's a safe bet that
shit UX drives significant revenue for Google.

~~~
yread
One thing that Chrome's address box has over Firefox is speed. Sometimes I
(mindlessly) press f and enter expecting FF to autocomplete to facebook but I
get taken to google search for f. (Which of course has facebook.com as the
first result)

~~~
imron
Setup a keyword bookmark in Firefox for F and this problem will be solved.

------
mhaymo
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.

~~~
NoGravitas
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.

~~~
mistermann
Man, if this was a thing I would definitely run it. All the plugin approaches
fall down for me as I use FF and Chrome interchangeably for different tasks.

This would be a good additional feature for Pinboard perhaps (which I've been
intending to subscribe to for ages but never get around to).

~~~
NoGravitas
Unfortunately, HTTP proxies are kind of a thing of the past. Back when I wrote
it, it was easy to implement a proxy (HTTP 1.0 with some HTTP 1.1 features).
Now there are two issues. The smaller one is that you have to handle a lot of
complexity from HTTP 1.1. The bigger one is that increasing use of HTTPS (a
good thing!) means that things like caching, ad-blocking, and history search
absolutely have to be in the browser. The author of Polipo, one of the best
caching proxies, has declared it obsolete for this reason.

It would be a good feature for the deluxe Pinboard subscription. As long as
you're mirroring the content, you might as well index it with Lucene or
something.

------
bshimmin
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?

~~~
kalleboo
Is making a browser for power users a bad thing? Does all software have to be
lowest common denominator?

~~~
signal11
Also worth noting: users often don't know what they want until they see it.
Tabs in browsers were a 'power feature' NetCaptor introduced (and Opera
copied), then they got really popular.

~~~
digi_owl
Err, Opera was doing "tabs" for the word go. Only that Opera used MDI. This
was present all the way to the end of Opera 12.

------
flippyhead
At the risk of self promotion I made [http://fetching.io](http://fetching.io)
to solve exactly this problem across all the browsers I use.

------
chairmanwow
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.

~~~
kagamine
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.

------
towb
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.

~~~
nhumrich
Almost every Linux WM let's you disable borders on certain windows. That's
what I do on firefox.

~~~
towb
Yeah, but there is a lot of uglyness going on with linux programs over all,
where different settings and themes doesn't really help. Vivaldi looks good on
it's own and has decent settings for changing the looks, thats what I like.
Maybe FF is the same.

------
nhumrich
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.

~~~
Touche
Brave has the same problem. I think it's a problem with Electron that makes
doing that difficult.

------
msimpson
I've found Vivaldi is becoming slower and slower with each update to the point
that I'm starting to lose confidence in the browser itself.

[https://forum.vivaldi.net/search?term=slow&in=titlesposts&so...](https://forum.vivaldi.net/search?term=slow&in=titlesposts&sortBy=relevance&sortDirection=desc&showAs=posts)

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/3052560/browsers/vivaldi-
brow...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3052560/browsers/vivaldi-browser-
review-powerful-features-outshine-slightly-sluggish-performance.html)

[https://thequo.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/one-glaring-
problem-...](https://thequo.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/one-glaring-problem-of-
the-new-vivaldi-browser/)

etc...

------
jonmccull
Lots of nice touches here to visualise your browsing data in Vivaldi, and
adding History as a side panel in the browser.

It's part of the 1.8 release of the browser launched today.

------
agumonkey
Good, I don't think the visualisations are that helpful, but the
timeline/calendar part is. Lots of things to do in browsing history.

------
sengork
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.

------
mdekkers
I switched to Vivaldi from Firefox a few weeks ago, and like it a lot. I am
missing tree-style tabs _a lot_ but the horizontal tabs come close.

~~~
jonmccull
You can vote for new features on the Vivaldi forum here:

[https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/14250/feature-requests-
for-1...](https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/14250/feature-requests-
for-1-8-1-9/3)

~~~
mdekkers
Yeah, I know, thanks :) Somebody actually released a treestyle extension
yesterday which I found a few hours ago, and it is really quite decent
already! [https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/15332/tree-
tabs/14](https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/15332/tree-tabs/14)

~~~
mistermann
Wow....any chance you could post a screencap????

------
inthewoods
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.

~~~
JohnTHaller
It's worth noting that Firefox offers multiple profiles support (since before
Chrome existed). I can't speak to battery life on the MBP, though, as I'm a
Windows user.

~~~
inthewoods
Yeah Firefox isn't much better sadly in terms of battery.

------
digi_owl
Sadly the touch screen support is still more miss than hit.

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
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.

------
nerform
It would be great if Vivaldi implements all the features available in Vimium
(chrome extension) natively.

~~~
jonmccull
Looks like the only thing missing is the shortcuts to select URLs to follow on
the current page (which is pretty cool, btw).

Otherwise you can do everything Vimium can by customising keyboards shortcuts
and using the "Quick Commands" menu (similar function as the menu brought up
when typing "O" in Vimium).

Keyboard Shortcuts settings: vivaldi://settings/keyboard/

Quick Commands menu: [https://help.vivaldi.com/article/quick-commands-
menu/](https://help.vivaldi.com/article/quick-commands-menu/)

------
pingec
Any news on the mail client? They have been "working on it" for a long time
now...

------
chrismorgan
I just want my browser to save every page that I load and make it full-text
searchable.

------
mrcactu5
it looks beautiful. sometimes applications like this are hesitant to share
their source code b/c of their business model or something.

are there any good "hackable" web browsers these days?

~~~
C0d3r
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbl)

------
johnchristopher
If looked for a URL I visited two days ago and click it does the URL jump to
today or is there now two entries for that same URL ? (I wish it's the second
option)

------
known
Not much difference in [http://arewefastyet.com](http://arewefastyet.com)

------
innocentoldguy
I like Vivaldi well enough. The features I use most are tab stacking, page
tiling, and full-page screenshots.

------
konart
The most notable feature is the partial links selection, line in old Opera.

Now we need sync and attachable dev tools window.

------
duiker101
I really like Vivaldi, I just would like if they allowed for custom start
pages.

~~~
jonmccull
Do you mean custom URL for Startpage? Setting for that here:

vivaldi://settings/startup/

Or something different, e.g. customising the "Speed Dial" pages further?

~~~
duiker101
You just saved my life, I see I can put an extension URL in the start page.
This is perfect. Vivaldi is now my go-to browser ;)

Thanks!

~~~
jonmccull
Nice!

------
DeepYogurt
BRILLIANT!

------
lloydatkinson
What a crappy title. Why isn't it "Vivaldi browser releases calendar view mode
for history"?

~~~
sctb
Thanks, a moderator updated it a little while ago from “Vivaldi browser v1.8
released, with more useful browsing history”.

------
notum
Where's the GitHub link? I usually download my browsers using a repository.

------
kuschku
Now, this is an example of what an extension could provide in Firefox. And
still can, today.

But in a few weeks, in Firefox stuff like this will be impossible – as the
browser devs refuse to implement these features, and refuse to give extension
devs the ability to override such browser-native features while still feeling
native.

I built a similar extension for Firefox which I didn’t publish (the reasons
will be obvious at the end of this paragraph), where I log the entire browser
history on my own server, transform all loaded pages via reader mode, also log
them, then provide fulltext search in all of them, which sites were visited
after another, how did I open tabs, etc, forever.

This means I can search history for years, with postgres fulltext search, and
find anything I’ve visited or read about, pages I saw before or after, etc.

It’s an amazing tool, but obviously once Firefox enforces WebExtensions, it’s
useless, because I can’t integrate it with the omnibar or with the history
tool anymore.

~~~
philbo
I've read similar complaints to this before, yet when I look at the
documentation for WebExtensions it seems like there's plenty of scope to do
what's wanted.

In this case, what is wrong with the history [1] and omnibox [2] APIs?

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/WebExtensions/AP...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/WebExtensions/API/history)

[2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/WebExtensions/AP...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/WebExtensions/API/omnibox)

~~~
kuschku
I don’t want to _expand_ on the history the browser provides. I want to
completely replace every bit. I want to be the history API.

That’s the problem. I don’t want to glue a new frontend on top of what exists,
I want to completely replace every history API the browser provides, and
replace it with my own.

I, as extension dev, can’t remove the history API’s implementation, and build
my own implementation. I can’t change what backend the browser’s history UI
uses, or replace that UI.

I can’t hijack the history button in the menu, or replace it.

With Firefox, today, with lots of hackery, I can get pretty close. But I still
can’t fully get there.

With the new WebExtensions, I can only add UI – but not replace UI, or add
backend functionality, or replace backend functionality.

~~~
nsgi
You can definitely do that for Chrome extensions, not sure about Firefox.

[https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/override](https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/override)

This would be sufficient to create the type of feature described in the
article.

Not sure why you'd want to replace the backend, this could break other
extensions. Both WebExtensions and Chrome extensions allow changing/deleting
browser history items, which should enable most things extensions would want
to do.

~~~
kuschku
> Not sure why you'd want to replace the backend, this could break other
> extensions. Both WebExtensions and Chrome extensions allow changing/deleting
> browser history items, which should enable most things extensions would want
> to do.

As I said above, the whole point is to do my own history tracking system,
which stores history via a sync system of my own, in a server of my own.

And loads it from there, too.

The user has a webinterface, mobile interface, app integration with browsers,
etc.

You can easily do fulltext search of all sites you’ve ever visited, etc.

"Breaking" other extensions is intentional – I want to replace the backend in
which they search.

I want to provide far more than what any of these browsers provide, although
Vivaldi is still the closest yet.

