Vivaldi Hits Its First Beta (vivaldi.com) 140
An anonymous reader writes: Following well over 50 developer snapshots and 4 technical previews (Alpha), the new browser upstart has hit its first Beta release today. Following almost a year of work on alpha, Vivaldi is coming out with many unique features such as tab stacking and tiling, notes, and quick commands for navigating and feature use. Other features are in the works, such as sync and built-in mail client that will be introduced when they hit a more stable state. It's a refreshing take on the browser: as many others are diverging to a common design template, Vivaldi is taking a more feature-rich and customization-heavy approach. (We linked to a hands-on report about Vivaldi earlier this year, too.)
The browser wars are over (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody needs a new browser.
Re:The browser wars are over (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but this browser is robust, and innovative, and refreshing, and exciting, and some other PR buzzwords that are supposed to make us give a flying fuck.
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The mere fact that it's not Firefox, which seems to get more annoying with every release, is reason enough to give it a try.
Re:The browser wars are over (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially not one that looks like the UI was designed with MS Paint. Seriously... this [vivaldi.com] is what passes for a modern and aesthetically pleasing application these days?
The Notes feature sounds marginally useful, but that's already in Firefox via one of a dozen addons. Actually, all of their "killer features" exist already or could easily be implemented as addons for Firefox. Remind me again why I should change to an ugly Chromium clone without advertising or script blocking features?
Don't get me wrong -- Firefox is going to hell too, but it seems to be running a slightly slower race than other browsers. I'm not going to switch to a front-runner.
Re:The browser wars are over (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not like opera invented it. There was an IE addon (i am not sure if inofficial), which added the really oldschool tabs from win95 (think of excel / libreoffice table tabs) in the win98 days .
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The UI looks fine, it's a minimal UI that is to be expected with today's browsers. It doesn't look any less professional than any other browser.
Remind me again why I should change to an ugly Chromium clone without advertising or script blocking features?
...he says, while linking to a screenshot that shows Ghostery installed.
http://www.ghacks.net/2015/03/... [ghacks.net]
Firefox has been relegated to the back burner for years now. It does a decent job as a development tool with Firebug, but otherwise it's pretty slow and clunky. And according to my task manager it still hasn't managed to figure out process separation for tabs.
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...he says, while linking to a screenshot that shows Ghostery installed.
Ghostery is neither an ad-blocker nor a Javascript manager.
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So you're thinking that the browser supports Ghostery, but not other extensions? Did you look at that link I posted?
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I have now, but obviously hadn't when I posted my original comment. I saw the icon, but for all I knew it was just a custom version of ghostery that they'd added to the browser. Of course even your link says "it supports the majority of extensions published for Google Chrome", so who knows what works and what doesn't (though they do say uBlock appears to function, so that's good).
So perhaps it's on par with Chrome when it comes to extensions, but that almost makes me wonder even more what the point of Viv
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That screenshot shows Ghostery installed and running.... so clearly it supports ad/tracker blocking
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Maybe its just me, but i really like the clean, no frills UI shown on Vivaldi screenshots...
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Re:The browser wars are over (Score:5, Informative)
Just load the unpacked Opera or Chrome/Chromium extensions of your choice. The extensions that I've tried have all worked.
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Addons could be crashed, and not works each browser's update.
Addons could make browser much slower.
Not mention that somethings "easily be implemented as addons for Firefox" are not the same things (those) addons intend to be implemented.
Example, I use Opera 12 (Presto), one function that sometime I need is "Cached images", which is disable displaying, completely/partially load/not load images in webpages. Firefox has an addons called "imgLikeOpera", whic
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Opera 12 has function of selecting any text on pages, include the links, by holding the mouse's left-button while moving cursor like text editor. There is a work-around solution in Opera-Chrome but cause some unwanted side-effect. Firefox, does not have this.
Maybe I'm following, but I usually copy snippets exactly like that; left button selecting some displayed text, in both current Opera and Chromium and Firefox(ESR). For precision I adjust the selection with shift arrows. Works in all browsers/engins I tried, including Vivaldi alfa.
What I really miss from the early browsers (up to IE5) is the half page scrolling using the keyboard (d/D iirc?). Today there's only the whole page scrolling by space/shift-space.
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In Opera (= 12), if mouse left-button was held long enough (less than a second), the browser knows that you want to select text instead of drag a link.
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Use the dark theme, its nice.
And wait for theme support, it will come.
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Especially not one that looks like the UI was designed with MS Paint. Seriously... this [vivaldi.com] is what passes for a modern and aesthetically pleasing application these days?
What were you expecting? Glossy? Skeuomorphic buttons? Glowing buttons? Glass imitation?
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>> Nobody needs a new browser.
This project appears to specifically be after Opera users, whoever they are. From the "our story" page:
"In 1994...Opera was born...Fast forward to 2015. The browser we once loved has changed its direction. Sadly....we came to a natural conclusion: we must make a new browser."
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Not everybody wants to use the same 2nd-rate trash the mainstream likes. There are quite a few people that will move to Vivaldi once it is done.
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Nobody needs a new browser.
Mmmm. Good point. And the world only needs 4 or 5 different kinds on cars. No point to innovating or trying new things.
You must be very valuable where you work.
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I do. I am still on Opera 12 as, frankly, all new current mainstream browsers have a really bad and broken UI, including any post-12 versions of Opera. Now Opera 12 mostly works fine today, but the number of sites broken with it is slowly increasing.
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No privacy policy and no adblocker = No sale, chick.
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Re:Privacy policy (Score:4, Informative)
Privacy policy? https://vivaldi.com/privacy [vivaldi.com]... What exactly are you looking for?
Adblocker? I am currently running Vivaldi with Adguard Adblocker, although many others are available. It runs chrome extensions, so.... yeah.
Looking Glass? (Score:2)
Sounds like they are implementing lots of features I saw in Solaris over a decade ago. Sure, it's a browser instead of an OS but.... Well, I'l give it a look just like I did with Sun's uber desktop.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Agreed. I believe the phrase is "converging on a common design template".
People want browsers that are fast, light, and get out of the way. All the focus should be on the content!
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All the focus should be on the content!
No, the focus should be on allowing the user to view, organize, and access the content in a way that is intuitive and convenient. Of course, the components of this ideal are vastly different across the user base - hence Firefox addons and 'about:config'. Firefox's market share has gone down as Mozilla has tried to force a more uniform, less configurable browser experience on their users - I doubt that a new browser with even less configurability is going to gain much traction.
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I think ffx went down because users switched to chrome. if what your saying is correct and people wanted configurability, why would they be switching to chrome in the first place?? maybe ur wrong? just a question, not saying one way or the other.
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So, that would be approximately one different browser and work flow for every user.
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Agreed. I think that was the writer's intention.
It's an unusual brain-fart.
diverging? (Score:1)
as many others are diverging to a common design template
No. Diverging is what the editors are doing from the English language.
...many others are diverging to a common... (Score:3)
diverging:
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Would love a "simplified" browser project (Score:4, Insightful)
>> Vivaldi is taking a more feature-rich and customization-heavy approach
No thanks - we already have this from Firefox (yuck) and to a lesser extent Chrome. Give us the ability to shut off Flash animations and HTML5 video by default on our browser and you'll have millions of downloads.
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Presumably all repeat downloads by the same 10000 people who give a shit about this, want to pretend it's a huge deal, and who don't realize you can already easily turn those things off in at least one existing browser.
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I actually just dropped it down to 2GB and it is still running beautifully. I admit it is running on Linux, but still 2GB isn't much these days.
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You forget that anything Firefox or Chrome have, they ripped off (badly) from Opera 12 and before. Vivaldi is just a revival of that older and actually much, much better technology with modern tools.
rpm for linux does't work centos 6 (Score:1)
$ vivaldi-beta
If they are going to build a binary, then at least staticly link it.
Opera bad, Puffin stutters (Score:1)
Will it work with AMC.com on 5.0 Android? Chrome is a POS there to watch shows.
Where are the trumpeting unicorns? (Score:2)
No trumpeting unicorns. I still have to get up to get some coffee. I don't see what's so special about it
Re:Where are the trumpeting unicorns? (Score:5, Informative)
Me too. My notes on Mac:
- Bing is default search engine.
- The colored bar at the top changes from red to orange to blue to ??? (who wrote this, the Melnorme?)
- Videos loaded and ran automatically (Booooo!)
- Asked to use my Chrome Keychain upon connect.
- Integrates with Google Phishing/Malware and Safe Browsing interfaces
- Do not track is off by default
- There's some kind of "Vivaldi Mail" sidebar ("coming soon") - do not want
- There's some kind of notetaking facility (independent of current page) built in - for what purpose I do not know
- The bookmarks were prepopulated with US-based (and New York / San Francisco centric) items
Re:Where are the trumpeting unicorns? (Score:5, Informative)
Adding the following:
- Huge memory footprint, on par with Chrome. This is the #1 issue I have with most modern browsers and Chrome is by far the worst offender. I understand RAM is fairly cheap, but fuck, 2 GB RAM occupied with 4 tabs (GMail, Forge of Empires, Google.com main page and Slashdot) achieves full retard status.
- Bookmark import works, but creates a sub-folder in the Bookmarks Bar / Imported Bookmarks rather than the expected behavior of asking whether prepopulated bookmarks should be replaced.
- You can't move multiple bookmark folders to the bookmark bar although you can select multiple folders (it only moves them one by one).
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Isn't the consensus that "Do Not Track" is supposed to be off by default? I think the argument goes that if it's on by default, then web developers won't take it seriously because most people who have it turned on didn't make a conscious decision to say they didn't want to be tracked. By leaving it off by default, it's sends a stronger message, that the person made a conscious decision to say they didn't want to be tracked.
Personally, I think the whole thing is stupid. I don't think that websites pay any
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This is because 'Use Page Theme Color in User Interface' is enabled. It can be disabled in the Appearance section of Settings.
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>>>> Do not track is off by default
>> At least this statement is wrong
On a Mac, under my privacy settings, on a fresh copy of Vivaldi (which I'd never installed before), the "Preferences | Privacy | Do Not Track | Ask Websites Not to Track Me" is UNCHECKED. I'd post a screenshot if I could, but doesn't that mean "do not track is off by default?"
>> what do you mean by "bookmarks were prepopulated"?
When I opened my bookmarks on my virgin Vivaldi browser, they already had "Speed Dial",
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"Do not track" is an option which MUST be off by default. If you don't understand why, you don't understand what it does. Enabling it by default actually, really, DISables it for everyone.
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>> "Do not track" is an option which MUST be off by default.
Then you should be happy - it appears to be OFF in Vivaldi. If you follow the thread, though, you'll see that I was responding to an AC who said that it was ON by default.
(I really don't care one way or the other because no one really seems to take the Do Not Track option seriously, least of all web sites.)
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Do not Track was off by default on my installation as well.
About bookmarks, he means the browser comes bundled with a gazillion bookmarks to shit I don't need.
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For really incompetent values of "web designers", i.e. the average one.
New from scratch Opera (Score:2)
Will be worth checking out. Was a fan of Opera from back in the Win 3.xx days.
But if it uses JavaScript to do its thing, can JavaScript be turned off for sites? Hmm. I normally run with no-script in Firefox.
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replying to myself - not form scratch after all - uses chromium as the base...
From the forum re memory usage/optimization:
"Not to burst some bubbles, but I'm afraid that great optimizations will never happen.
Chromium is the base of Vivaldi, and Chromium is resource hungry, period.
Optimize Vivaldi would mean to fork and heavily patch its code base, that would be an effort impossible to sustain for a small company like Vivaldi.
Surely some small optimizations would be possible on the Vivaldi specific code, but
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uses chromium as the base...
I was hoping for a completely new engine, or a resurrection of Opera, so I was disappointed with this especially given how disillusioned I've become with Mozilla's insanity lately. It seems every "new" browser is actually Chrome with a different veneer.
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The new Opera (v. 33 or dev build 34) is based on Chromium, correct. It is vastly different and, by my guess, so far from the original that it could never be pulled back into the Chromium base. The source if available but it is not free, as in libre, if one wants to distribute it with their proprietary bits (that's my reading of the license). It is not in the repos for any distro that I'm aware of, only the older version exists there. There's no BSD version, as of yet, so that's a bit of a pisser.
I'm an Ope
How about feature-poor? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You've got single images using just 1 MB. you're lucky if you're using only 20 MB per tab.
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Also, something which can tell me which tab is playing some audio,
I've been using the Vivaldi nighltlies on Ubuntu for about a month now and it does show an audio icon when a tab is playing sound.
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You know tabs show an audio icon when that page is making noise now. In firefox you can use the audio icon to mute that tab.
Hmm, mine doesn't. But then I am only on 41.0.2.
Once Converged, thus Divergence Commences (Score:2)
Let the recapitulation begin!
Or, at least, let Timothy please look up the difference between convergence and divergence.
Any new functionality (Score:2)
Testing nightmare (Score:2)
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Why would you bother testing for a platform with no discernible browser share?
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Dear world ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we have a browser which is, you know, just a browser?
We don't want social integrations, we don't want cross device linking, we don't need an emailclient, a chat client, something to manage our contacts, sidebars, or any of a dozen features we just turn off an ignore.
We want a browser, small, lean, standards compliant, not a memory pig, and which respects our privacy.
Stop trying to make some do-everything turd which wants to be the center of our freaking lives. We don't need another one of those.
Do one thing, a web browser, that's it.
kthanksbye
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We don't need another one of those.
Vivaldi is built for the ex-Opera-Presto users. They focus on this community.
This browser is not for you, so move on.
Herp Derp. (Score:2)
How did the world get by before vivaldi?
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So it's a new browser that brings tab stacking back to the table!
We used opera 12, which was before opera dropped the tab stacks. You should try them sometime; they are super nice.
My two wishes (Score:2)
I just played with the beta a bit on Mac OS X 10.8.5.
The good: A respectable score of 521 in html5test.com.
The bad:
1) Bookmarklets apparently aren't supported in the beta. I created one
javascript:alert("bye");
which works fine on Safari, but which gives me an error message "Inalid URL." when I define it.
And according the discussion here [vivaldi.net], other users can't do bookmarklets either.
2) I also wish they'd have a way for me to request a peaceful, quiet, calm, whatever you want to call it, mode. No sound, no movies
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I'm sure before too long someone (let's be honest. Google.) will develop a full 'machine learning' system to learn which javascript to block, etc, automatically (and then someone will find a way to use it to end... i don't kn
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Probably because the updates add suck without adding any useful new features.
I finally moved from 10.6.8 to 10.10 and honestly the only thing that really feels like an 'improvement' is that I can disable transparency in the UI. There's a whole lot of new annoying crap to deal with, though.
Cannot wait until this browser matures. (Score:3)
I've been following the snapshot diligently, and as a huge fan of Presto Opera, it's almost everything that I've been missing (still currently using Opera w/Blink). The one deal-breaker for me is the fact that a few of my absolutely extensions don't work properly.
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I've been following the snapshot diligently, and as a huge fan of Presto Opera, it's almost everything that I've been missing (still currently using Opera w/Blink). The one deal-breaker for me is the fact that a few of my absolutely extensions don't work properly.
This. People here don't seem to realize that Vivaldi is the spiritual successor to Opera Presto, which was beloved by its fans in part for the features it offered. When Opera became just another simple Chrome clone, it lost that which made it special.
I hung onto Opera 12.xx as long as possible (until the major websites actively started blocking its user agent), and was so disappointed by Opera Chromium I went to Pale Moon. I've been using Vivaldi occasionally since early preview releases, and lately it's
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Give the v. 33 a shot w/regards to Opera. I used Opera back in the days when I had to pay for it. It's not that bad. I hated it, at first. Oh, did I hate it. (I gotta tell ya, I was some pissed.) They have improved greatly since around the v. 28 days.
I want to like Vivaldi but now, instead of just one, I must run it with --no-gpu-composting and it fills up the terminal with a stream of errors. *sighs* I'm waiting for it to improve. I've been tracking it faithfully. I even did a small journal post on it.
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What are you talking about, Opera 12.17 being actively blocked? I have not run into that and I still use it for most browsing.
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Basically anything with sophisticated Javascript or AJAX. Most Google sites (Maps started reverting to a dumbed-down html version before Google forced the new Maps), Facebook, bank websites, T-Mobile's website, etc. etc. Many, many different websites would show messages along the lines of "upgrade to a modern browser to use this site." It was also really slow and unresponsive especially with many tabs open. (PC is Win7 Pro 64-bit, Core i7 with 16GB RAM, SSD).
The final straw for Opera Chromium was that it
A built-in mail client (Score:2)
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I don't know what if Vivaldi will be if it has, but in Opera 12, built-in feed reader (mail) has advantages, and it consumes zero additional resource.
Vivaldi is Opera (Score:2)
Vivaldi is built by the same people as the original (before it became a "skin" for Chrome) Opera was, so the design and features are not really surprising.
I wonder what will we have to sell to be able to use this browser, though. Aka, how is Vivaldi going to make money with this "free" (as in beer) browser?
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is vivaldi based on webkit or it's own engine?
It uses Blink [wikipedia.org], which is itself derived from WebKit. Blink is used by Chrome and Opera Chromium.
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It's chromium-based, so Blink. (So yeah webkit...)
Vivaldi was Interesting - a year ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I can't stand their implementation of Tab-Stacks - it is less than useless, and just makes finding a given tab even more difficult than it already is when you have "too many" open.
Then there's the whole censorship crap that goes on in the forums - just like it always was over at Opera HQ - though perhaps the mods aren't as completely off the hook over on Opera's side these days --- though it still is prevalent.
I got banned from Vivaldi.net last week because it's auto-spam detector didn't like a forum post that did word|word|word|word. I had been a member since the beginning, had a post history over the last year+. At this point, well fuck you Vivaldi.
Crap removal? (Score:3)
Since it is chromium based, does it
1) remove all the google phone home junk?
2) block ads
3) block js/flash
4) remove all the google phone home junk?
5) block all tracking?
if it doesn't do any of the above, what is the reason to switch?
Oblig. (Score:3)
"Following almost a year of work on alpha..."
So... Four Seasons of Vivaldi then?