Vivaldi Browser 1.0(vivaldi.net) |
Vivaldi Browser 1.0(vivaldi.net) |
By the looks of things Vivaldi is Chromium with a skin written using React, but there's no links to a repo or any API documentation as far as I can tell. The extensions page in the browser suggests it uses Chromium's extensions API which rather defeats the "Customize Everything" tag line that's all over the website. Is it possible to load in my own React components to add to the browser chrome some how?
doesn't sound like a good thing.
Adding node.js and react on the user interface may open up security issues
If it's not running in a sandbox, I'm worried about issues like these: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/04/noscript-and-other-p...
Plus it's not open source so we can't check for vulnerabilities.
e.g. having a vertical tab list out of the box is great, even when it still lacks some nice features from Tree Style Tabs.
Such as? I find it less customizable than Firefox or Chrome
I tried Vivaldi many times over the last year, and my conclusion is that I find it unusably slow. They take direction I like, but they chose technology that is bad (but cheap). Maybe it will get better, I surely hope so. Another nitpick of mine is that it uses WebKit (or whatever it's called now) and I hate using that.. but I do... because browser market (and perhaps web itself as a result) is in a really bad state.
What makes it different (and better in my eyes)? It's a browser usable out of the box, without any extensions. Not to say there shouldn't be any extensions, just that the basic functionality and configuration should be there.
1. For me obviously, personal preference and all.
- On OSX all browsers except Safari consume battery like crazy - In Vivaldi you can use "hibernate background tabs" and it will take a lot less resources
- Vertical tabs - I tend to have a lot of tabs open (Hibernate feature is even more handy in this case)
- Tab group tiling - I can have 2 websites open side by side in 1 browser WindowI feel like window-management is pretty much broken at this point. I can now have multiple windows, containing multiple tabs, containing multiple ... what would you call those things? Mini-windows? Pages? Panes? Anyway, we also have tiling window managers, OSX's very limited equivalent, full-screen modes that are very slightly different from maximised windows, Chrome doing its own weird UI for ripping a tab out of its window and merging it back again, Firefox's tab groups, one ordering for app-cycling, another order for window-cycling, one-or-the-other order for tab-cycling... It's all getting a bit too much.
> I feel like window-management is pretty much broken at this point. I can now have multiple windows, containing multiple tabs, containing multiple ... what would you call those things?
Are you saying that we should do all "window" management on OS level? I want to maximise screen estate, having 2 windows side by side with vertical tabs will just take way too much space on a laptop screen.
Compare the following and tell me which one do you prefer:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
The great suspender is open source, Tabs outliner is not - but it doesn't require access to all your site content (It will require access to browser history though).
Is it using webkit or something else?
Edit: Also Mozilla's Servo browser engine will use a web based user interface.
I think that if you're going to write a desktop application, you should either use your native platform's APIs or pick a GUI toolkit that can give you a native look and feel. It'll give you a fast UI that looks and behaves consistently with the rest of the user's environment.
Let's see... Vivaldi is Open Source Chromium with a bundled closed source app (Want to see that is true? Open Vivaldi task manager, kill the webview Vivaldi process, and UI disappears, but browser keeps running) to create the UI which is thanks to how it is created highly exploitable.
No thanks, go away!
After using it for an hour for my regular browsing, I noticed it uses a lot of CPU for some websites. I saw over 100% for pages where Safari chugs along with 25%. That's enough to get the fans spinning.
Also, waiting to see the promised mailer app. I still use Opera Mail for my mail but now that it is in the Chinese hands, I do not feel comfortable updating it.
Not only opera had a very nice engine of its own (not anymore in Vivaldi, though), but also great functionality and ways for customization
Vivaldi 1.0 32bit DEB
Vivaldi 1.0 64bit DEB
Vivaldi 1.0 32bit RPM
Vivaldi 1.0 64bit RPM
I don't have plans to move away from Firefox, but it's always nice to see people attempt new things.
I'm liking it so far. If you aren't crazy about Chrome's UI, it's worth a shot. Hope to see more privacy features, but right now the settings are the same as in Chrome.
And dont forget competition encourages the big browser companies to work together to maintain interoperability, not branching off to 'their software' trying to create a competitive moat or simply because they want to push the world in one direction with monopolistic power. If people have options it stops this typically negative behavior happening.
Your definition of innovation might be different, but both IE and Firefox have gone through major changes for the better ever since chrome entered the scene.
I'm used to all these little features of the native interface and if you remove them, my productivity suffers.
Also, no MDI. Although at least the devs did a good job including the "click current tab to go to previous tab" option. 80% of my use of MDI in classic Opera was to do that.
On the other hand it's also Webkit-based at the moment, because everything seems to be... the architecture is multi-engine though.
For me Opera wasn't great because it had bundled irc/torrent/mail clients. I couldn't care less about those. It was great because it was stable, fast, small, memory efficient. No other browser was even close at that time (2012 they neded iirc?). Had all the things you want - content blocker, ui/input customization, great tab/window management, "inspector",.. and I don't even know what else anymore :)
I don't think Otter will be able to achieve many of those. Partially because it uses webkit and is in no place to maintain its own fork.
Then there are frustrating things like how do I move the reload/stop button to the left? Why do have quite powerful UI customization when it doesn't allow such a simple operation?
Yes, the performance will matter. But as Servo demonstrates there are a lot of speed gains to be made with the right design.
See this talk by Patrick Walton about Servo's WebRender: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#...
And this short demo comparing Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Servo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0hYIRQRiws
Making browsing and maintaining your own rendering engine is not easy which is why we don't have a lot of competition in the this market.
I'd like to see a windowing system that totally revamps how we think about screens, apps, windows, tabs; menus, toolbars, etc. When should a menu be linked to an app and when should it be linked to a tab? How can we meaningfully manage all these things together? Do we really need a 5th level in this hierarchy? Is it really a hierarchy, or should an 'app' be able to overlap more than one screen? Does it ever make sense for a tab (image a 'naked' pane displaying an image) to be available to more than one app? etc.
I feel like, yes, we need to solve these issues at a higher-than-app level, because every app doing its own thing will just be incredibly confusing.
Just my observations & opinions: I don't think we will reach a point anytime soon where desktop apps have standardised UIs much more than now. The most effort in this space is done on iOS. Apple pushed UX Guidelines quite hard, most of the apps are mainstream consumer oriented and are not even that complex so Tab bar on the bottom + screens above works well. Desktop apps are generally much more complex and therefore harder to standardise I guess.
The point is that Vivaldi is a toolbox. Some people like toolboxes.
When Opera switched from Presto to Chromium, it was about as fast, but it was much lighter. Yet, almost every Opera fan/"customer" at the time was pretty mad. It was not because they were attached to Presto, but because of the huge feature depreciation. It's the features what made people use Opera until its 12th iteration, and some even use it today despite it having huge issues chewing through the bloat of JS on some sites.
The thing with Opera features is that each user had their own pet features. In fact, when Opera released the new Chrome-based versions, removing lots of features, they claimed that those features were not used by the vast majority of users (an example was bookmarks which they claimed was unused by more than 90% according from their survey data). And it may very well be true, but the problem is that each particular feature was used by a different minority, so they upset a lot of users even if for different reasons for each user (in my case, menu bar, MDI and "click tab to minimize" were some of the biggest ones, other people don't care about these but loved tab stacking which I always turned off, etc.)
In view of this, even if I didn't use all Opera's features, I think trying to implement the full feature set is a sensible goal.
For the record I think the bundled clients, at least IRC and torrent, are quite low priority in Otter anyway.
That's true, but they surely spent their resources on developing these extensions. In hindsight, this wasn't such a good bet. Case in point: noone else did that, and this approach is rather outdated now.
(No offense to Opera supporters - I used it on PC for a while and it worked very well esp. on slower machines, and I use it on Android to this day - but this was annoying like hell)
But I don't count among those who call other browsers rubbish because they don't have some features. Personal preference and all that. However, I hate Opera Mini. It has little to no control. Not Mobile though! (if it still exists)
The whole idea of a browser as a swiss-knife internet suite (with an email client, torrent client, web server etc. all built-in) which was hailed as Opera's main strength back in the day, proved to be an evolutionary dead end - noone really followed that path, Mozilla had an enormous following, especially among geeks/superusers, and yet its SeaMonkey never gained traction, that does tell you something
I feel Opera hurted themselves by believing that this was what made their browser attractive. Probably overestimated that factor. As a user, I cared much more about whether eg. "Look into" on Amazon worked correctly (Opera - a few years ago when I used it - was the only major browser where it didn't).
Yes internet browsing still owes Opera much credit, they popularized a great many useful solutions such as mouse gestures, the product was very solid and ergonomical, I'm not questioning that. Plus it performed well on older PCs and slower bandwidths, which probably explains why it enjoyed tremendous popularity in Central and Eastern Europe (where I'm from)