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Vivaldi Browser 5.0

vivaldi.com

71–80 of 153 posts

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#71
post #61

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton…

That's the sort of attitude that's ruining Firefox. They're removing everything that makes it useful in a appempt to turn it into a Chrome clone. Vivaldi is the only remotely viable alternative to Firefox.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#72
post #61

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton…

Vivaldi is clearly for power users, but you're definitely exaggerating. It's not that complicated, and performance is fine.

Being based on Chromium is the only thing that keeps me from using it as my main browser.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#73
post #61

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton…

On top of that, their open core model makes it hard to say how secure all that UI is and how pro-user they actually are. In that phone-home test they had some of the worst score n that regard, together with Edge.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#74
post #67
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow- Doesn't Vivaldi support any chrome extension?

Yes, but you have to get them through the Chrome Web Store. It's the same with Brave.

You can also just add the extensions by temporarily turning the "Developer mode" switch on and dragging the archive into the extensions pane.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#75
post #61

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton…

It is odd. Also harder to trust a small org.

Maybe an angle to getting a size-able slice of the browser market for a start up at this point would be just being super simple, very private-first, and than have a better development experience + inspector than Chrome's. Then let all the "tech" people push it out. No easy task.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#76

I've read their business model... https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ I just wonder how well it works in supporting them vs asking for money from their customers to support a decent/private browser stack.

Honestly, what is there to support? Once you strip Chromium of all the code that uses any Google services, more than half the job is done.

Vivaldi is not just another repackaged Chromium, it has it's own completely custom UI and special features. For example, it has built-in mail, rss, calendar, and contacts "apps", and a built in screenshot tool that lets you capture an entire page or a single element.

Features like that are why you would want to use Vivaldi over another Chromium-based browser. I don't even know if they actually went through the effort of a thorough de-Googling. Also, their custom UI is not open source, so the browser is partially proprietary.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#77
post #68

With FireFox becoming more and more unusable, does anybody with experience know if Vivaldi or Brave are objectively better (or faster or more stable)?

Honest question, how is FireFox becoming unusable for you? I am using it on both Linux and Windows and do not really have any problems with it. Sure, sometimes a web site does not load properly but more often than not is because some add-ons like ad-blocker and no-script are intervening for me. In other cases, its obvious that the website was never tested in anything but chrome. In those cases where I really need it,…

Agreed, it has been my daily driver for years and I have never had any problems with it. I think the guy your replied to is just riding on the Mozilla hate train.

To be fair, Mozilla does deserve 99.999% of the hate it gets, but that doesn't justify making dishonest claims about Firefox just to stick it to Mozilla.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#78
post #69
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of browsers out there that already give the experience you want. Like Ungoogled Chromium (or regular Chromium). I always see a lot of power users being enraged to other browsers when they remove features that the 1~5% of their users use so it's a bit weird to see protests against one of the few browsers that attempt to reverse the oversimplification trend. Vivaldi's main deal is allowing the user to cus…

I use Safari for actual browsing because it's really unbeatable at it - very fast rendering, has tabs. I'd argue Chromium doesn't quite live up to that promise thanks to the horrible UI rendering and spectacular battery drain that it inherits from Chrome. Firefox I think does a nice compromise between being a good browser and having all that customisation stuff that the kids seem to like, but it does have a tiny hit…

Safari user here too. It's great. Admittedly, I'm fairly invested in the Apple ecosystem and enjoy my laptop and phone operating as two views on the same computing state, so I'm biased... but Safari renders very nicely, has minimal UI, runs fast and I like it a lot.

I'm not looking forward to the Monterey tab design tho' when I eventually have to upgrade to a "current"-ish version.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#79
post #61

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton…

Its mobile browser is fantastic. Much better than Firefox, Opera, or Chrome, IMHO.

Re: Vivaldi Browser 5.0

#80
post #61

Vivaldi is the exact opposite of what I want from a browser. I want a rendering engine and some tabs, that's pretty much it. Vivaldi decided to encumber those two good things with a 1000 features and some horrific themes, making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been. Every time I've tried it it's just reminded me of that old screenshot of MS Word with all the toolbars switched on [0], a ton…

> a ton of unnecessary cognitive load

I'm curious - what features does Vivaldi have that add cognitive load to users not using them?

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