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Hands-On With the Vivaldi Browser 167

Posted by Soulskill from the does-not-consume-all-available-memory dept.
justthinkit writes: Vivaldi is billing itself as the power user's browser, and Ars went hands-on with it today. They say, "Vivaldi has so many great features, but it can be a little frustrating because it is still very much a technical preview. It's been largely stable during testing (most of the bugs we encountered using the first release are gone in the second), but it's still missing some key features." It appears to have the cred, with Vivaldi's CEO being Jon S. von Tetzchner, the co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Does the thinking behind Vivaldi appeal to you? Do you plan to switch when it's more feature-complete?
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Hands-On With the Vivaldi Browser More

Hands-On With the Vivaldi Browser

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  • So far they only have Three Seasons (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    OK, I'm leaving.

  • Looks like Windows 3 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bjwest ( 14070 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @06:14PM (#49201297)
    Why in hell are we going back to 2D windows? Hell, we just go to the point where they were looking decent, and now everyone's going back to that ugly flat-ass look of the 90's?

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That is a good thing.

      I don't want my UI filled with useless shiny shit for children (and adults alike) with ADHD.
      I don't want borders that are touch-screen friendly.
      I don't want bastardized toolbars that aren't predictable. (Ribbon) (also touch-screen crap)
      I don't want my GPU being used constantly, driving up power bills.
      I don't want distractions and eye-rape. (borders and lines, borders and lines everywhere, let's not forget gradients)

      I just want a UI that is intuitive, won't suddenly make my life harder

    • So you care about eye candy rather than technical features of software. Why do you go to a forum where they critique the accessories in the Paris fashion show? People like you are the reason GUI have become bloated pieces of shit

      • Re:Looks like Windows 3 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bjwest ( 14070 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @07:17PM (#49201681)

        So you care about eye candy rather than technical features of software.

        No, but I do care about ascetics, and I don't want my desktop to look like a 90's reject.

        People like you are the reason GUI have become bloated pieces of shit

        Nope. Lazy programmers are the reason for this.

        • "aesthetics".
          Ascetic: characterized by or suggesting the practice of severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.

          I'm glad you care about them, they definitely need some love (pun intended) but I guess that's for a different article.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @07:36PM (#49201805)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • +1 Funny.
          +1 Insightful.
          +1 Interesting.
          +1 Underrated.

          You sir just won my today's internet.

        • There's a term for XP: It's called "Fisher Price windows" and I'm happy those days are dead.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gTsiros ( 205624 )

          going off on a tangent, whoever is responsible for android's ui needs to be tortured.

          no clear indication of accepted taps, no indication the device is busy, no way to distinguish interactive elements from eyecandy, menus needlessly hidden even on huge devices, pointless separation of menus (eg: why are there two menus with different styles in youtube?), elements abruptly changing location whilst being active (you tap somewhere but at the last fraction of a second, the list refreshes without warning and now

        • For what it's worth I also think the Metro look is incredibly ugly, and I suspect is a major reason why Windows Phone has utterly failed to succeed at any level.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • It's not just eye-candy, 3D effects can convey info. For example, having buttons look 3D helps to visually distinguish them from other boxy things. Same with tabs that cast shadows. Such cues are generally good (if done right).

        Why not give people a choice in the OS? Have "flat", "3D", and maybe "Jewel" for those who really do want eye-candy.

      • No need to get personal.

        FYI you actually slow performance down when you turn off aero and other 3d effects due to the fact that GPUs accelerate the load off the cpu. :-)

        Going flat uses the exact same GPU in Windows 8 as it is accelerated anyway so you use all those precious cpu cycles to emulate the early 1990's. No gain what so ever.

        Yes in 1984 the mac was slow due to graphics but our computers are literally 180,000 more powerful (not even counting the cpu). The mac had 1 mips. An i7 has 130,000 of them! I

        • Now that was hilarious coming from nick of "Billy Gates". Aero, is that a thing on that glorified program loader from Redmond fraudulently sold as an OS? My machine has none of that.

      • People like you are the reason GUI have become bloated pieces of shit

        UIs are drawn the same way regardless of how they look. There's no reason a pretty UI can't be in any way as fast or lean (reads: no bloat) as a plain boring grey window. It's akin to painting your house is a nice colour rather than everything in the same shade of grey.

        Do you live in a grey house with grey walls grey ceiling gray floors and all grey furniture?

        • No, there are many, many layers in a typical UI. And so we have lightweight desktops to counter that problem

          • But layers and design don't go hand in hand. It's no different drawing a window with a border or without a border. You only start having performance hits if you do things like render bitmaps in the background.

            You don't need bloat to make a nice looking UI. The existence of bloat at the same time doesn't automatically make the UI nice.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Looks like Windows 3 (Score:4, Informative)

      by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Friday March 06, 2015 @06:30PM (#49201397)

      You do realize that by calling Windows 3.x "flat" you've lost all credibility, right? The '90s were the heyday of the "beveled" fake-3D look!

    • Re: Or Windows 10 ;-) (Score:5, Funny)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @07:55PM (#49201899) Journal

      Take a look at these low color icon beauties. [neowin.net]

      The art professors I am sure who teach this UI stuff to future designers are drooling already.

      Hey it beats adding leather to the addressbook in skuemorphic design right? You all whined and complained. Well you got it.

    • Windows 2000 - Microsoft's best OS yet, if you prefer function over eye candy.

      (A decade and a half has brought numerous improvements under the hood, no doubt)

    • Vivaldi is likely to be skinnable... (Score:4, Informative)

      by UpnAtom ( 551727 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @10:57PM (#49202593)

      ... and one has already been done:

      https://vivaldi.net/forum/all/... [vivaldi.net]

      • Just give me a skin with some freaking windows borders.

        I loved Opera 12 and I'm dying for Vivaldi to bring back that vibe, but I stop using it after 10 minutes every time because I accidentally click windows behind it because there are NO BORDERS.

        Ugh.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by UpnAtom ( 551727 )

          I agree.

          In my opinion, Opera 12 was the prettiest browser. I still use it on my laptop.

          I'm going to forward this Slashdot post to Vivaldi so that they can see how unpopular their skin is. Unfortunately, their website is done out in the same skin.

          I guess Tetzchner wasn't the aesthetic one in Opera Software.

          I still think Vivaldi will soon be the best browser available for power users.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ..so yeah. I'm still stuck with Opera 12.17 simply because there isn't a single comparable browser and the "new" Opera is not even deserving of that name.

  • That's a no-go for me, I definitely want adblock and tracking protection, and hosts file blocking can be too crude, especially against tracking.

  • Opera 10.10 for 90% of my browsing. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06, 2015 @06:35PM (#49201421)

    Opera 10.10 still does very well.. Now that various large sites have stopped trying to sabotage opera directly, ebay, amazon, others work better than they ever have...

    I'm a heavy user tho. I often have 40+ tabs open in a system with less than 4gb ram; as well as other applications... Chrome and Firefox I run in a VM when needed for sites that fail in Opera(Walmart! Lowes, Homedepot)...

    The best features of opera few talk about are actually "Site Preferences", Content blocking, and more detailed control. I can disable or enable javascript/animations/whatever on a site by site choice... Does Vivaldi provide this?
    Side by side opera uses a tiny fraction of the system resources per-page than chrome/firefox..(firefox v3.6 uses about twice that of opera 10.10, newer version are all much worse(to display/do the same thing I might add).

    • If you are going to use Opera 10, you might as well use the final 10.64 -- it was around 10.60 or so that the dev's finally fixed all (?) the regressions and flat out bugs that were endured during the horrible Opera "Next" (10.2x-10.5x) transition.

  • Here I iz (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @06:38PM (#49201439)
    Okay, I've downloaded and installed Vivaldi, and am taking it for a test drive.

    Initial thoughts. Faster than Safari. Incredibly faster than Firefox, which has become like the retired Athlete that put on 100 pounds in 3 months and can't keep up.

    Lets you see what cookies are placed on your machine.

    Nice Keyboard Shortcuts Youtube runs well, the browser does a weird expanding thing when going to full screen, but works fine once there (it's no slower to get there, so it was just a surprise, not a knock. Configurable tabs

    They have a "mail" sidebar. Not certain if web or standard - not implemented yet.

    Notes are kinda cool

    Things needed:

    Cache location and ability to set size needed, plus ability to run with no cache.

    I want to know the high persistence cookies and where they get stored, plus the ability to dump and/or refuse them.

    This was all with a 15 minute tour. I'm posting using Vivaldi at the moment. It's definitely in preview form, but pretty interesting.

    • Incredibly faster than Firefox

      Was there a reason that Firefox went off a cliff a couple years ago? It seems like it was great, and then started to suck horribly.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        It hasn't been bad lately. I run the "Developer Edition" 64bit on Windows 7 at home. It's snappy enough and I haven't been experiencing the random hang-ups like I used to on Nightly 32bit. Chrome still feels faster, but it's noticeably heavier. On Windows XP, the regular releases have been dramatically better than Chrome for the past year or so.

        Rather than going "off a cliff" I've been noticing steady, all-around, improvements.

      • Firefox jumped the shark after version 4.

        Denials of memory leaks, removing the menu bar because they wanted to copy Chrome, no built-in support for Flash and/or PDFs, etc.

    • Perhaps I'll give it another try.

      Vivaldi was much more sluggish than Firefox when I tried it the last time Slashdot ran a story on it.

      • Posting this using Vivaldi now...

        Verdict:

        1 loads pages in the background, not rendering until complete giving perception of slowness. Probably lots of weird ajaxy calls.
        2 memory consumption higher due to process model
        3 stuttery scrolling using mouse wheel.

        Thanks but I'll stick with Mozilla.

        • I just tried it with a similar experience. Looks like it might some day be a replacement but it's still a work in progress.

          I'm looking forward to a competent firefox replacement. All the BS with the menu bars and now a chat client being built in is bad enough, but I don't like their politics or how they treat other people's politics.

      • the first tech preview was very flakey, the Vivaldi_TP2_1.0.94.2.x86_64.rpm is a lot better and more stable, just downloading the 3rd one now vivaldi-preview-1.0.118.19-1.x86_64.rpm
  • oh, you mean lynx... no?
    oh, right the other links... still no?
    oh, with a GUI, you mean DIllo then.
  • I do plan to give it a test and may well migrate to it. I am still using Opera 12 for some things that it does better than any other browser I have tried.

  • Cognitive load (Score:3)

    by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @07:35PM (#49201785) Homepage Journal

    One thing that Mozilla doesn't get (and engineers in general, I ween) is that changing things imposes a cognitive load on the users.

    I'm used to Firefox, it does what I want and doesn't require my attention very much. The major reason I don't switch to Chrome or any of the other browsers is cognitive load: I'd have to learn an entire new way of doing things. Different looks, different icons, different behaviour... it would take hours to figure out the new system, many minor "how can I get it to do this..." moments amortized over the next year.

    Every time Firefox changes, it's a distraction. Something to notice, figure out, and get around. For me this time it's the offline cache system - no amount of fiddling with the options or about:config will cause the system to save tabs on program exit and load those tabs anew on start - the weather *has* to show yesterday's page on program startup(*).

    The previous issue (for me) was putting the window rendering in an external thread, the upshot was that cascading menus took several seconds to render. Click, count to three, then see the bookmarks... move the cursor, count to three, see the selection bar move down. Setting the about:config option to undo this caused Firefox to crash on every boot, but un-setting "use hardware acceleration" fixed that. (My dad is *totally* going to figure that out and not move to Chrome instead.)

    All this "OMGWTF we need to be like Chrome!!!" and "OMGWTF we need a chicklet interface" is driving users away from the system. For every change, a number of users say "screw it, I'm moving to $OtherBrowser".

    Changing behaviour at all is stupid, doing it once a month is ridiculously stupid. They're thinking in terms of "how can we add more functionality" instead of "how can we attract and keep users".

    Pro tip: adding complexity to every little feature does not necessarily make your software more popular.

    (*) To be fair, I've only tried 6 of the 64 possible combinations of options that might affect this (in Options->Privacy and about:config). It might be a simple fix, I just need to uncover the right combination of options to do it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by solios ( 53048 )

      If they honestly wanted to add functionality, the Firefox developers could do it in a way that didn't disrupt existing users. Apple did this more or less right with Spaces, Expose, and the Dashboard - I don't use any of them, I never will, and I don't have to to perform the same basic tasks I've been using a Mac for since the 90s. The shortcuts are on the keyboard and in the system preferences but it's difficult to accidentally invoke these things unless you're looking for them. They're unobtrusive.

      The fr

  • I was a big Opera fan back in the day, but have moved on to Firefox since. Mozilla would have to disappear entirely for me to switch to yet another proprietory Webkit/Blink browser.
  • For all Four Seasons! [wikipedia.org]

  • With unencrypted passwords? :) (Score:4, Informative)

    by saikou ( 211301 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @09:14PM (#49202217) Homepage

    I mean yes, it's a browser for "friends", and friends won't try to steal each other's password, but would it kill them to actually encrypt locally stored credentials?

    ~/.config/vivaldi/Default/Login Data

    Plain text for such storage is kinda silly.

    https://vivaldi.net/forum/private-browsing/1405-passwords-are-unencrypted
    https://github.com/mortenoir/vivaldi-stealer

  • I wonder how they plan to make profit from a browser.

  • I only see a "thing" with an extremely ugly UI.
    I don't get it. What is wrong with software where a "tab" in a window looks like a tab, and not like "something".

    I'm tired of "searching" on a UI for stuff. We are using "visual" interfaces so you get "visually" a clue how to interact with the software.

    E.g. it is plain distracting that on Safari /. now has "animated buttons" for "preview" and "submit". WTF. Who comes to the stupid idea that this is an "improvement"?

  • ...going to be hard to make anyone give a shit. ESPECIALLY web devs who don't want yet another browser that does something slightly different.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Web devs don't need to give a shit.

      It's Chromium under the hood. If it works in Chrome, it'll work in Vivaldi.

      Like Opera, this is a browser for USERS - giving them the features they want and using the rendering engine just to draw the pretty pictures.

      For reference, I had click-to-play-plugins, ad-blocking, pop-up and tab management, private tabs, built-in bittorrent, user-agent masking and everything else you take for granted YEARS before they came out in any other browser. Because Opera wasn't about the

  • Vivaldi is not yet my default browser, but I expect it to be there when it's ready. Some parts of the interface (especially the mail client) need a bit of work, and yes it still needs stabilization, but it seems to be coming along well.

    I have been involved with Opera for over 12 years and Vivaldi for about 6 months. Not certain I'd consider any browser since Opera 12 on my old 1 GB netbook - I don't see Opera 27 or Vivaldi useful in such low RAM, which is unfortunate. On a better system, both are good brows
  • Opera was the browser with features...but then they kept adding features for no reason other than to add features. Does a web browser really need an IRC client? An integrated bittorrent client? They just went nuts adding crap, evidently because they were bored.
    • To be fair, once a product becomes stable and updates become less frequent you'll get a bunch of blog postings saying "Is [product name] dead?" and people will talk about the new hotter product that may not be as stable but "has a very active development community".

  • Desired feature: no fingerprinting (rant) (Score:3)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Saturday March 07, 2015 @08:18AM (#49204085) Homepage

    Desired feature for any browser, failing that a plugin: Something that really restricts the information the browser sends to the server, to prevent fingerprinting. There are UI switchers and the like, but I have yet to find one that just bloody stops the browser from sending identifying information.

    A website that isn't trying to be bleeding edge has no need to know my OS, my browser version, what plugins I have installed, what fonts are on my system, or indeed anything at all about my system and setup. Send me standards-compliant HTML and CSS, and let my browser worry about the representation.

    It seems to me that this should be a standard setting, right next to "prohibit 3rd party cookies". Why isn't it available in (afaik) any browser at all?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Because, as many sites especially for this will show you, it's almost impossible to do so.

      Tricks like interrogating the CSS colour of links will tell you whether or not they've been visited - potentially revealing browsing history. Playing with certain javascript functions that are REQUIRED will allow you to fingerprint a browser quite easily. Standards are required to let you know if a font isn't available so the website can adjust - and even without them, it's possible to tell they were never loaded fro

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