Vivaldi and me: Just browsing? Nah, I'm sold Some time late last year, without most of us really noticing, the Vivaldi browser became genuinely, startingly useful. I’d met the Opera Software founder Jon von Tetzchner two years ago when he unveiled Vivaldi's technical preview. Jon has always one of the more thoughtful and engaging founders you meet. But what was he doing …
I've been using Vivaldi since version 1 was released, and it became my default browser this past summer. While most browsers seem to be dumbing down the UI, and taking settings away from the users, it's refreshing to use one that allows virtual micro-management of the UI and settings. When this morning I fired it up, and it offered v 1.7 I had no hesitation to download and install it.
It's stability has been the only sore point in my experience, with random, inexplicable CTD's, the built-in HTML 5 video player crapping out and requiring a page reload to get going again, and some other little odds and ends. It's snappy enough on my circa 2011 TOL DAMMIT rig, so I'm not sure why it would seem slow on Orlowski's much superior I7 system, although it does not start up as quickly as IE 11.
Frankly, it puts me back in the mindset of Safari back in the OS X 10.5 days, which I still use on a Volvo 240-like Power Mac G4. It's good to see power being handed back to the people who want it.
I used Vivaldi for a bit last year - went back to firefox after a bit, because it was lacking with something... I forget what.
I should give it a go again. I did like it, but it was not quite the browser I wanted. - like Firefox on Android - while Google realised that people want to use their phones one handed, and added tap+swipe to zoom in and out to the OS, firefox mobile doesn't have that, so I need to use two hands to have the freedom to pinch to zoom properly.
Press F12 and you get Chrome-devtools, although the window title very quickly changes to remove the chrome reference.
A bit of further digging (and the fact it has Chromium PDF viewer plug-in pre-installed) revealed it's based on Blink, which is a fork of Webkit used by Chrome/Opera, so it should render pretty much the same.
It seems pretty quick, and I rather like the look of the theme I picked, so I might actually give this a go for a while, although the coordinated tabs between my desktop browser and mobile browser is a bit of a must-have, so I'll have to see if that can be done.
Posted from my Vivaldi browser window.
I've been running Windows 10 for as long as everyone else, and this is NOT my experience. Just doesn't happen.
P.S. Does Vivaldi 1.7 still phone home to Google like earlier versions did? (What with it being just yet another fork of Chrome)
IME, the behaviour is as described, but not as in the headline {= FAKE NEWS!!!}
Some links will open in Edge (Help files from Office, I think), but Edge doesn't actually change the OS setting to make itself the default browser for everything. I suspect that the excuse is that these web pages need to guarantee that the browser used has certain capabilities, and that only by making that Edge can MS be sure.
Sounds like rubbish to me, but in this world of iEverything and Google, the monopoly abuse complaints of yesteryear seem relatively trivial.
Has not happened here at Arctic Fox Towers either. Both La Señora and I run Surface Pro 3s running Win 10 Pro and use Firefox as our default browser. The behaviour that Andrew describes in the context of Vivaldi simply does not happen here. What the issue is I do not know the implication that this is some kind deliberate try-on against third party browsers does not accord with our experience.
Interesting this comes up today as I was just re-visiting Vivaldi last night. I want to use it over Firefox but unfortunately I still find the font rendering under Windows too blurry for my taste (a problem with all Chrome-like browsers since they ditched the GDI font rendering, forcing DirectWrite).
I tried Vivaldi, but for all the talk of how customizable it is, it's still not nearly customizable enough, at least through normal means (changing options in menus).
Firefox with a full complement of addons of my choosing is my baseline and the standard against which all others are judged, and the Chrome addons I saw don't match what can be done with Firefox's. Take a look at the breadth of the options available in Mozilla's Classic Theme Restorer... it's got everything. Well, not everything, but still, a huge, huge amount. That's just one of my addons; there are almost 30 others. My browser is exactly as I want it, and it bends the pages I see to my will, not that of the site's creator. I won't have it any other way.
Of course, Mozilla seems hellbent on continuing their suicide by taking out all of the customizability that made them what they are and instead becoming a fourth-rate "me too" Chrome wannabe, because being indistinguishable from Chrome will make people who already like Chrome... keep using it and not something that gives them no reason to switch? That can't be where I was going with that. Why is it that every piece of software I like is eventually sabotaged from within by its own devs?
Agreed: I don't like the single, zoomable text size control: its too imprecise. Being allowed to choose both font and point size, as used by Firefox and Opera, is preferable.
However, I'd be happy if Vivaldi never got the promised e-mail agent added to it. I have always preferred programs that do just one thing and do it well and have no problem with using a separate e-mail agent (such as Evolution) and newsreader (I use Pan).
However, this is all rather moot since the Vivaldi package has vanished from Fedora and I didn't like it well enough to have looked for more direct ways of installing it. Maybe dropping it as a supported package was a response to discovering the Chrome renderer's phone-home sneakiness? If so, hats off to Red Hat for giving it the chop.
FWIW, my browser of choice is currently Pale Moon. This is a Firefox clone that omits a lot of the recent bloatware and is subjectively faster.
One thing that's surprisingly missing in Vivaldi (or I haven't found it) is the web page language settings. Not even Firefox has knocked that on the head yet... touch wood.
Why is all software sabotaged by its devs? Perhaps there's no handing down to new programmers of 'things we rejected because we found out they were crap'. Then 20 years later we get Windows 10.
"It’s hard to believe that so many legal battles were fought over IE and Windows default settings, for so many years, only for Microsoft to revert to this behaviour so soon after its antitrust consent decrees expired."
Unfortunately, no it isn't- quite the opposite.
It's why the antitrust consent decree was- and is- required. The leopard does not change its spots.
"It’s hard to believe that so many legal battles were fought over IE and Windows default settings, for so many years, only for Microsoft to revert to this behaviour so soon after its antitrust consent decrees expired."
Ha ha ha,. Good one Andrew! Hard to believe! Ha ha ha. Erm, you were joking.........right?
'Vivaldi still isn’t perfect – it takes forever to load a new window even on modern (2016) i7 hardware. But using anything else is now painful.'
Starts up as fast as chuff and the same goes for a new window, don't know what you are on about?
Actually loads a new window faster than Firefox TBH.
I like Vivaldi very much, use it often, but I went back to Edge, mostly for 2 reasons:
- it does not support touch well;
- it does not play well with many sites when using an ad blocker: it becomes unresponsive, on generally has to select another tab or make the windows small then expand it, to be able to scroll again, click on a link, ... Somehow, I don't have the same problems with Google Chrome & the same ad blocker.
In the mean time, Edge has improved a lot, and while its still missing features, it's highly useable.
Vivaldi is still my goto browser for viewing 4K videos, since I assume Google is making it so that Edge is limited to 1440p.
Yeah, I used to spend hours fiddling with all sorts of settings on my computer, and spent hours tuning my '67 Impala for that little bit of performance.
Eventually though you reach a point where you just want to get work done, choose a stable platform, and get on with it. For me that has been Mint Cinnamon for several years, with exactly two settings to change: turn off Caps Lock and change the wallpaper to something NASA.
That's also why I stay far away from Windows 10.
Chrome is popular because it's simple, and "just works" out of the box, and because it stays the same from one version to the next. For the vast majority of users that consistency is more important than stacked tabs or command line interfaces.
Received this somewhat pretentious marketing email from them within the last hour.
And when you try to unsubscribe, the page generated is a 404 error message.
I think I'm justified in calling them knob-heads
"Hey Customer,
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed varius, leo a ullamcorper feugiat, ante purus sodales justo, a faucibus libero lacus a est.
Sed varius, leo a ullamcorper feugiat, ante purus sodales justo, a faucibus libero lacus a est. Aenean at mollis ipsum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed varius, leo a ullamcorper feugiat, ante purus sodales justo, a faucibus libero lacus a est.
Cheers,
Team Vivaldi "
One more thing to note with the v. 1.7 release: The Windows task-bar correctly activates when set to auto-hide, and Vivaldi is has a maximized window! When I was running the previous release under Windows 10, with the task-bar set to auto-hide, it would only intermittently display if I moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen. With Windows 7, it just would not display at all unless I minimized to task bar, or did a restore-down. Huzzah!
That has been a persistent problem with Chrome for quite some time. As of a couple of days ago it still wasn't fixed. Haven't noticed it on Opera or Vivaldi but I seldom use those two.
(I'd be happy to use either or both if they ever get the interfaces fixed, but so long as they keep on pretending to be Chrome, I might as well just use the real thing or (as I mostly do) Pale Moon (has simple options fo fix interface), Seamonkey (good straight out of the box), Firefox (good provided you have Classic Theme Restorer), and real Opera (truly ancient, can't be used on many sites these days, but still the best browser UI of all time, and still has killer features you just can't get anywhere else).
It's been around for a couple of years now and there is still no single close-tab function. It's a shame as many other things about Vivaldi are great. But it is nuts that they still don't have this simple, useful ergonomic design feature where so many competitors do, including Pale Moon, Seamonkey, Firefox and even the original Opera.
Fair go chaps, you practically invented this useful feature back when Opera was the trendsetting pioneer. Get with the program.
Running W10 Pro here; the only times I have had my default browser switched back from FF to Edge were at the big update last year and one occasion when I got things into a horrible mess and did a clean reinstall.
I might try Vivaldi again having had a go with it in the early days of its introduction.
I like Vivaldi and use it as my default browser.
However I do have some issues with it:
- no tree-style tabs (see the Firefox plugins)
- when you multi-select tabs, pressing a hotkey (ctrl-F4 to close, F5 to refresh) does not apply to all the selected tabs.
And that's about the extent (at at least the often-encountered annoying one) of my problems with it.
"It’s hard to believe that so many legal battles were fought over IE and Windows default settings, for so many years, only for Microsoft to revert to this behaviour so soon after its antitrust consent decrees expired."
Gmail on Android has started opening links in its own version of Chrome, rather than your default browser / asking which it should use.
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