Vivaldi 8.0 Arrives With 'Most Significant Design Overhaul' In Browser's History (neowin.net) 25
Vivaldi 8.0 is being pitched as the browser's "most significant design overhaul" yet, featuring a new unified, edge-to-edge interface, six preset layouts, and deeper customization across tabs, toolbars, panels, and themes. The company is also taking a swipe at rivals chasing questionable AI features. Neowin reports: After updating to version 8.0, Vivaldi will present you with the ability to select one of the six pre-built styles. You can select a minimal edge-to-edge theme, one with the UI fully hidden for focused work, or a power user variant with everything on the screen. The update comes with a built-in collection theme, and users are free to select one of over 7,000 community themes available on the official website.
Vivaldi says that while other browsers were busy adding questionable AI features, it focused on "a foundation that no other browser can match" with flexible tab management, built-in productivity tools, and advanced customization. At the same time, Vivaldi does not force the new design onto its users, so those who prefer the previous user interface can go back to it at any moment in settings. "With 8.0, we have done something we have been working toward for a long time: we have given the browser itself a visual system worthy of everything it can do," says Vivaldi's CEO and co-founder, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. "With this update Vivaldi feels like one considered, coherent tool."
You can download Vivaldi 8.0 and view the changelog at their respective links.
Vivaldi says that while other browsers were busy adding questionable AI features, it focused on "a foundation that no other browser can match" with flexible tab management, built-in productivity tools, and advanced customization. At the same time, Vivaldi does not force the new design onto its users, so those who prefer the previous user interface can go back to it at any moment in settings. "With 8.0, we have done something we have been working toward for a long time: we have given the browser itself a visual system worthy of everything it can do," says Vivaldi's CEO and co-founder, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. "With this update Vivaldi feels like one considered, coherent tool."
You can download Vivaldi 8.0 and view the changelog at their respective links.
No uBlock Origin, Chromium manifest v3 (Score:5, Interesting)
While they are doing creative things with the UI (but not really to my taste), at the end of the day it's just another Chrome browser, so no manifest v2 support and no uBlock Origin. While Vivaldi puts in their own ad blocker safety system, it's nowhere near as good as uBlock Origin. I don't understand why Vivaldi devs don't patch manifest v2 back in. Would be a huge selling point.
So Firefox remains the only game in town for safe web browsing. I keep Vivaldi around for the odd site that won't work in Firefox, but it's definitely not my daily driver.
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Agree. I use Vivaldi on my work machine but stopped updating just before the move to v3. I won't use a browser without uBlock.
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Both manifest v2 and uBlock Origin are supported in Vivaldi.
They're deliberately keeping them alive.
My only gripe with Vivaldi is the implementation of its UI. The whole thing is basically a Webapp.
On low-end machines the performance can be quite bad, and even on modern ones, there's an overhead that I'm uncomfortable with.
While not specific to Vivaldi, the software world as a whole has foolishly pivoted away from native toolkits for the sake of convenience, laziness and a fair bit of sheer incompetence.
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That is false. Vivaldi does not support any manifest v2 initiative beyond what was provided in Chromium and explicitly said as much early last year. As of right now there's no manifest v2 support, uBlock Origin is not supported, and since Vivaldi uses Chrome's own store, it isn't even listed in search results.
If you have uBlock Origin installed right now, you're running an outdated version.
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If you already have it installed, it continues to work. If you create a new profile and try to install it, you'll find you can't.
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As a matter of interest what does uBlock Origin bring to the table over uBlock Lite? I know *in theory* what the difference is, but in practice people largely are interested in ad-blocking, and I've seen no change in adblocking performance due to the loss of manifest v2. Do you have specific examples of things that are functionally different on the internet due to the use of manifest v2 related adblocking?
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As far as I know, the lite version cannot block elements inside the page. So you can stop ad.adcompany/ad.jpg from loading, but cannot remove annoying overlays that are included in the HTML.
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Can you provide an example of a site that has it? I'm genuinely curious since I'm simply not seeing a difference. I was all ready to abandon Chrome when this started, but gave uBlock Lite a go and genuinely haven't found a reason to switch.
Also didn't Slashdot have a shitty mongo db element at one point? That I killed by blocking the element using ublock... or are you talking about something else?
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uBliock Lite cannot block the kind of malware ads that come from html-load.com and related sites, and other ad-blocker-blocker systems that rely on integrated javascript. I've seen the html-load malware on slashdot even. Also I doubt uBlock Lite can stop YouTube ads, something that even uBlock Origin struggles with sometimes.
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Well I guarantee you something is stopping YouTube adverts, and I haven't done anything special to my Chrome install other than install uBlock Lite and a few non-blocking related addons.
I can't comment on html-load.com since I'm not sure I've seen it (not actually sure what you're talking about). Maybe I got lucky.
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There's still the Brave browser for uBlock Origin.
It works well enough for me.
Just Another Chromium Reskin. (Score:4)
I'm sure they are adding a bunch of other stuff, but at it's heart, it's just chromium.
Really wish we had a more healthy market for browser engines.
Chrom* (Score:2)
>"Vivaldi 8.0 is being pitched as the browser's "most significant design overhaul" yet"
No matter what they "design overhaul" or change, in the end, it is still just yet another Chrom*. No thanks.
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Long time Opera user - Vivalidi is Cool (Score:2)
Not that noticable (Score:2)
Vivaldi continues to mostly just work fine on most sites. Sadly, Slashdot is not one of them, here I use the Brave Browser for better experience.
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That can be fixed by disabling the "ABP anti-circumvention" list that's enabled by default. Or by using another adblocker, of course, it works with e.g. uBlock Lite with its default settings. I guess that Br
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That seems to be a newer thing. I had some other problems maybe 1-2 years ago and Brave fixed them. I do not mind using different browsers for some specific sites. Still, good to know, thanks.
chromiun (Score:2)
a foundation that no other browser can match
Well, the foundation is Chromium, so pretty much everyone will match that foundation
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>"They mean the foundation of the UI layer, as in porcelain, not the browser engine itself."
They can mean whatever they like, but the "foundation" of a browser is the engine. Not the UI on top of it. So calling out the misuse of the term "foundation" is warranted.
You wouldn't refer to the "foundation" of a Linux machine to be KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, etc. It would be Linux kernel that is the foundation (and perhaps with the associated GNU tools).
"Edge to Edge interface"? (Score:2)
Really?
Does Microsoft know?
Yet another Chromium browser (Score:2)
It's just yet another Chromium browser.
Sigh.
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Another way to look at it is the the 1986 Mustang SVO. It had utilized a generic compact Sedan platform for the body and the 2.3 liter 4 Cylinder Pinto engine that was putting out 80-90 HP on most cars.
Around those two generic platform/engine the Mustang SVO customized everything else and from the dealer it had 205 HP and could be considered one the of top sleeper cars there were.
Enthusiasts have tuned the thing to get well over 500 HP.
So yes the Pinto engine was a heavy, slow, unremarkable other than being