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Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

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Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#111

Post by Mithaldu »

tomw2005 wrote: post #109
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #91

As an old Opera user I really want to like Vivaldi, but the weird titlebar without title and especially the non-native menubar really turn me off (in a native menubar under Windows, once you click a menu, you can just move your mouse without clicking to navigate the rest of the menus. In Vivaldi's menubar, you can't, making the menus way clunkier to navigate). For this reason, I actually find the experience of Otter…

> I encourage old Opera fans to check it out as well. Did something happen to Opera to make it lose fans? I tried it a long time ago (pre-Chrome) and enjoyed it then but eventually ended up on Chrome. Are there any particular criticisms of the current version of Opera?

The last true version of Opera was 12.18, which is slowly bit-rotting to death, e.g. a number of modern https ciphers simply don't work.

Opera ASA then jumped to v15, which was a chrome fork with some branding, half-heartedly added a handful of features, and tried to pretend Opera 12 never happened.

Then the browser part of the business was sold to a chinese malware company.

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#112

Post by bigbugbag »

binarycrusader wrote: post #47

So what's the business model here? This is a "free" product, so how does Vivaldi intend to ensure its continued existence?

Right now, it's the same as ubuntu: personal funds of the founder.

Afaik as I know plan is to use an affiliate-deal but Jon Von Tetzchner said the business model is not based on understanding a user’s online behavior and profiling users to monetize. The focus is on providing superior experience and not maximizing profit per user.

For example vivaldi has partnership with phillips to work with their phillips Hue wireless lighting, and deals with ebay and booking.com on click on link basis.

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#113

Post by atlemo »

Aoyagi wrote: post #102
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #91

As an old Opera user I really want to like Vivaldi, but the weird titlebar without title and especially the non-native menubar really turn me off (in a native menubar under Windows, once you click a menu, you can just move your mouse without clicking to navigate the rest of the menus. In Vivaldi's menubar, you can't, making the menus way clunkier to navigate). For this reason, I actually find the experience of Otter…

I was asking for a proper native title bar possibly a year ago since I'm using the "classic" Windows theme and that's just ideal. It doesn't take up much space and it shows the whole page title. http://puu.sh/tcYJ7/b7479e05cd.png

Have you seen this setting? Apperance -> Window Appearance -> Use Native Window https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4ew5ptyusm4cjb/Screenshot%202017-...

You can also choose between horizontal menu on top, or "Vivaldi Menu" in the top left.

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#114

Post by StavrosK »

Mithaldu wrote: post #111
tomw2005 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I encourage old Opera fans to check it out as well. Did something happen to Opera to make it lose fans? I tried it a long time ago (pre-Chrome) and enjoyed it then but eventually ended up on Chrome. Are there any particular criticisms of the current version of Opera?

The last true version of Opera was 12.18, which is slowly bit-rotting to death, e.g. a number of modern https ciphers simply don't work. Opera ASA then jumped to v15, which was a chrome fork with some branding, half-heartedly added a handful of features, and tried to pretend Opera 12 never happened. Then the browser part of the business was sold to a chinese malware company.

And the tragedy is that Opera was the most innovative and light browser out of all of them. I used to run Opera on my old machine with 16 MB of RAM because it was literally the only browser that was usable.

Mouse gestures, tabs, integrated mail/rss/newsgroups client, and even a fricking web app platform for personal use made it the best browser then, and even now. It was always standards-compliant, but got a bad rap because of lazy designers who just tested in FF and IE and called it a day.

Opera Unite, in particular, the web app platform, was fantastic. They gave you a dynamic hostname with Opera and allowed you to run apps like photo albums and blogs straight from your browser (which had an embedded webserver if you enabled the feature), so people could publish their content completely decentralized, right from their computer and browser.

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#115

Post by tornadoboy55 »

m45t3r wrote: post #107
tornadoboy55 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Closed source = vaporware Then why has Firefox been the 'shit' browser for the better part of a decade now? Best battery life (usually by a 2-4h difference!) -> use Edge/Safari Best stability -> use Chrome Best performance -> use Blink-based browser Most extensions -> use Firefox (Chrome has 90% of the FF extensions available though) Hell, Firefox still doesn't have e10s fully working, so one tab takes down the ent…

Low memory usage is a Firefox win at least, partially because they don't have true multi process yet. I would gladly switch to Firefox on my dev machine (opening both Photoshop, Visual Studio and Chrome in a 8GB RAM system is a recipe to disaster), if their development tools didn't suck.

Do you you use macOS, Linux or Windows? Because if it's the first, that's pretty weird behavior. macOS is very good at compressing and vacating memory as necessary..

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#116

Post by fredoralive »

atlemo wrote: post #113
Aoyagi wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was asking for a proper native title bar possibly a year ago since I'm using the "classic" Windows theme and that's just ideal. It doesn't take up much space and it shows the whole page title. http://puu.sh/tcYJ7/b7479e05cd.png

Have you seen this setting? Apperance -> Window Appearance -> Use Native Window https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4ew5ptyusm4cjb/Screenshot%202017-... You can also choose between horizontal menu on top, or "Vivaldi Menu" in the top left.

Doesn't work properly on Windows, you just just get a blank title bar with only the window controls at right (not even the window icon / menu on the left appears).

Does work correctly on Mac OS though.

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#117

Post by StavrosK »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #58
StevePerkins wrote: post #46

I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it's coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they're a bit TOO fixated on Opera as it was 15 years ago. I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature fe…

Almost everyone I know using email for business uses a desktop client - usually Mac Mail, sometimes thunderbird. A new client that isn't quite so neglected would be very welcome.

I'm using Thunderbird and I can't wait for a mail client comparable to the old Opera's to switch. It would be fantastic.

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#118

Post by Capt-RogerOver »

BuuQu9hu wrote: post #65
cyberferret wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, next you'll be saying that we should replace coloured traffic lights with black and white "STOP" and "GO" signs? I'd suggest you do a Google search on the human ability to discern colour as an indicator way faster than reading text. Especially if on the peripheral vision outside of direct line of sight. NASA and USAF research papers on layouts of aircraft/spacecraft instrumentation etc. too might be helpful to y…

Your analogy is so broken I'm surprised you even suggested it. If there were as many traffic light colors as there are websites, obviously a sign with words is superior to some color-coded nonsense. Let's say for argument that you frequent 5 sites and we'll maintain your traffic analogy. What's easier: memorizing 5 colors and their associated speed limit or just looking at numbers on the sign?

We will obviously always use the url bar to tell for sure what site we are on right now. But the color thing makes it possible to much faster tell the difference. It's a very useful feature.

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#119

Post by Tomis02 »

StevePerkins wrote: post #46

I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it's coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they're a bit TOO fixated on Opera as it was 15 years ago. I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature fe…

Man, I really miss the skins in Opera 12, there were some gorgeous ones. I agree that the email client is not necessarily a priority, however

> Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you're currently on.

Oh wow, that's pretty bad for every other major browser. We have two use cases: 1) I want to open the link in a new tab and switch focus (presumably to read right now). 2) I want to open the link in a new tab and not switch focus (presumably to read later). In Vivaldi you can achieve (1) by "open link in new tab", and (2) by "open link in background tab". In Chrome you can achieve (2) but no way of achieving (1) without touching the keyboard. And even when using the keyboard the shortcuts are clunkier (ctrl+shit+click vs shift+click in Vivaldi), which is probably not even relevant since I regularly observe Chrome users (programmers nonetheless) using "open link in new tab" and then clicking the new tab. We should keep in mind that most browser users are not power users. Which leads me to

> but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors

It's the wrong default behaviors, and ~8 years ago I could have listed you a dozen epic failures of Chrome/Firefox usability. I sincerely doubt there's some elaborate reasoning for why they behaved badly, most likely it was just inertia and "works good enough". One of my pet peeves is that Chrome/Firefox don't restore your last tab session by default, which I find extremely annoying: a regular user who doesn't even know how to open the browser options will always have to reopen the previous tabs when restarting the PC.

Nowadays I rarely use Chrome/Firefox so I can't make a detailed browser comparison anymore, but from what I've been seeing there's no reason to think they're anywhere near as good as Opera 12 used to be. I agree that the usability changes could be a shock for new Vivaldi users but it shouldn't be too hard to adapt to a better way of doing things.

Re: Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends

#120

Post by Capt-RogerOver »

lsh wrote: post #9

I switched to Vivaldi as my default browser 6+ months ago after new-Opera became such an overwhelming disappointment I felt I had to abandon what it had become after fifteen or more years of use. Vivaldi definitely has the old Opera spirit, but not the performance. On original Opera I could have hundreds of tabs open, in Vivaldi I can have 60? not such a big deal, right!? well it's partly that, partly just a constant…

Have you tried firefox with a tab unloading extension?
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