[HN Gopher] Vivaldi 4.0
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Vivaldi 4.0
        
       Author : 0x49d1
       Score  : 431 points
       Date   : 2021-06-09 07:41 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (vivaldi.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (vivaldi.com)
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | " Simply put, the era of blindly trusting Big Tech is over.", but
       | why should I trust small tech? How are these privacy features
       | compared with Apple?
        
         | fpoling wrote:
         | It is really hard to subpoena a server in Iceland. Iceland gave
         | asylum to Robert Fischer despite huge press from US to
         | extradite him.
        
       | premium-komodo wrote:
       | I keep an eye on Vivaldi because it might be the one browser that
       | isn't going insane or becoming intolerable in one way or another.
       | I'd probably switch if they'd offer some subscription model so
       | that it's clear what I'm paying for, and that they're not making
       | money off of me any underhanded way.
        
       | solmag wrote:
       | I would love to use Vivaldi but it is by far the slowest browser
       | I've tried to use.
        
       | oblio wrote:
       | Vivaldi Mail? That took a while :-D
       | 
       | Vivaldi is developed by a team created by the former Opera
       | founder and CEO. Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of
       | Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.
       | 
       | For those who didn't use it, Opera was first a paid browser
       | (which limited its reach), then an ad-supported browser (which
       | again limited its reach). It then finally became a free browser
       | but by then it was too late.
       | 
       | It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its name,
       | Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader, calendar
       | (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration), a notes
       | app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent client. And
       | a TON of features and UI flexibility.
       | 
       | It was super compact, a marvel of engineering and UX design that
       | managed to pack all those things in a package of about 5MB at the
       | time, and you wouldn't even see or load the extra functionality
       | like the email client if you didn't use it.
       | 
       | Unfortunately with HTML5 and the Chrome-ification of the web, it
       | couldn't keep up :-(
       | 
       | Vivaldi tries to do the same on top of web techs and web techs
       | just can't handle it. Web techs are almost as flexible but
       | they're really slow and bulky.
       | 
       | Still, I wish them luck.
        
         | marban wrote:
         | Not to forget Opera Mini which did server-side rendering for
         | mobiles. Results were WAP-like quality and mostly sucked (by
         | nature of device's capabilities back then).
        
           | leokennis wrote:
           | Disagree. In 2007 I used a Nokia 6300
           | (https://i.imgur.com/5ezXN1R.png) and I had an unlimited data
           | plan for EUR10/month (because, who was going to use a lot of
           | data on 2G on a small feature phone?).
           | 
           | I used to smoothly browse the web on it using Opera Mini. It
           | had a simulated mouse and rendered most stuff excellently.
        
           | forty wrote:
           | I disagree. Opera mini allowed me to browse the web almost
           | normally (I was using a Nokia E65) and I never really
           | understood why I regularly see people saying the iPhone
           | brought internet to smartphones or something of the sort.
        
             | pmontra wrote:
             | I also used Opera on my old Symbian phone. Probably the
             | number of iPhones after two or three years was larger than
             | the number of mobile devices that people actually used to
             | browse the web before the iPhone. Nevertheless where I live
             | (Italy) the number of Android devices were always greater
             | than the number of iPhones. I'm thinking about the Galaxy S
             | and S2 in the very early 2010s and the other flagship
             | phones of the day. So, the iPhone brought the touchscreen
             | to the masses (the iPod too), Android brought the mobile
             | internet.
        
               | forty wrote:
               | Yes I give them touch screen. I admit I was a touch
               | screen skeptic (the kind of person who became mad when
               | someone would touch a screen so doing that on a regular
               | basis seemed a really bad idea to me ^^) and did not get
               | a phone with a touch screen until much later, when they
               | were basically the only option :)
        
           | jlelse wrote:
           | Opera Mini is still a thing.
        
             | Ayesh wrote:
             | Yes, I gave it a spin for old times sake. It's now full of
             | ads, sometimes even popping up in lockscreen.
        
         | bookofsand wrote:
         | paid => ads => free. How is a 'free browser' supposed to pay
         | its developers?
        
           | ols wrote:
           | They licensed the browser for devices like set-top boxes and
           | similar devices. There was also money coming from Google (for
           | using it as a default search engine). I guess they had also
           | some business model built around Opera Mini and relations
           | with mobile providers.
        
             | Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 wrote:
             | Did you say that desktop should be subsidized by non-
             | desktop browsers?
        
         | SkyMarshal wrote:
         | _> It had its own, super fast, rendering engine (I forget its
         | name, Presto?). It had a built in email client, feed reader,
         | calendar (unfortunately with no Exchange or Gmail integration),
         | a notes app, a powerful download manager and even a Bitorrent
         | client. And a TON of features and UI flexibility._
         | 
         | And don't forget its MDI interface [1] which made using all
         | those features a joy and is still today better than all the tab
         | implementations of modern browsers (for power users at least).
         | 
         | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface
        
         | muyuu wrote:
         | it abandoned the Opera engine though, to focus on the UI
         | experience
         | 
         | so, technically not very different to Brave although many users
         | are led to believe it kept the former Opera render codebase
        
         | howolduis wrote:
         | it forces you to provide a phone number to use it. I'm out...
         | too invasive
        
         | qwerty456127 wrote:
         | > Opera was first a paid browser (which limited its reach)
         | 
         | I'd argue that this, in combination with easy availability of
         | pirated serials (and the actual quality of the engine, of
         | course), contributed to Opera popularity because "why use
         | freeware when you can use premium software (which other people
         | supposedly even pay for) for free".
         | 
         | I believe this works so if I were going to release a commercial
         | app I would make sure to put some serials on pirate sites.
         | 
         | Even today, if you release a new Chromium-based browser, make
         | it paid but easily piratable it probably is going to enjoy more
         | popularity than if you release it for free.
        
         | whikhngbu359 wrote:
         | I believe Opera was the first browsers to introduce tabs.
        
           | slightwinder wrote:
           | No, it was not. That's a popular myth, but it's wrong. There
           | were other browser with Tabs before opera event tried them.
           | And Operas first attempts wasn't really Tabs in the modern
           | sense. It was just a poor working button-bar for an MDI,
           | which was a bit cumbersome to use. They fixed it two versions
           | later, around the time when the feature gained attention in
           | other browsers and even Mozilla Suit got it's first Extension
           | that became so insanly popular that it was build into Phoenix
           | (later renamend to Firebird, then Firefox) out of the box.
           | 
           | Though, Opera tried many things in that area. There never
           | really lost the MDI-Spirit and went with different approached
           | than most other TDI-Implementations. Made it more useful for
           | some, more complicated for others. So for certain specific
           | functions they probablly were the first ones.
        
           | _trampeltier wrote:
           | Yes, years before other browsers had tabs.
        
           | thanatos519 wrote:
           | I'm pretty sure Galeon had tabs before Opera, but maybe
           | something had tabs before Galeon.
        
             | Winsaucerer wrote:
             | I loved tabs in Galeon, it's the only browser I remembering
             | having it at the time, but I probably didn't try Opera. I
             | was sad when Galeon went away (or removed tabs? I don't
             | recall) and I couldn't find another browser with tab
             | support for a while. Again, I may have overlooked Opera :)
        
               | bzzzt wrote:
               | Galeon was also the only usable Linux browser having a
               | native look on Gnome (Epiphany was the other one, but I
               | remember it having more difficulty with a lot of sites).
               | It embedded the Mozilla engine (which was a supported use
               | case back then, before Firefox) but launched a lot
               | faster. Usable on a 200Mhz machine at least.
        
             | acheron wrote:
             | And in a HN thread a couple weeks ago someone posted about
             | how "everyone" switched to Chrome because it invented tabs,
             | if you want to know what today's web developers think.
        
             | thanatos519 wrote:
             | (Galeon had mouse gestures, too!)
        
             | chucky wrote:
             | According to Wikipedia, Netcaptor was the very first
             | browser to have tabs:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History
             | 
             | However, Opera supported an MDI interface before it
             | supported tabs, and if you count that it may have supported
             | multiple browser windows within one MDI window even
             | earlier, which could be said to be a form of tabs.
             | 
             | Everything depends on how you define "tabs", as usual.
        
               | slightwinder wrote:
               | I thin kyou misread that. Wikipedia says InternetWorks
               | was the first browser with Tabbed Interface, released
               | 1994.
        
           | rotten wrote:
           | It also had a built-in pop-up blocker which none of the other
           | browsers at the time had.
        
           | crummy wrote:
           | It also had mouse gestures, right click drag left to go back,
           | right click... swirl? to reload... felt like I was casting
           | spells!
        
             | tssva wrote:
             | And the reason I don't use Vivaldi today is that it doesn't
             | support trackpad multitouch gestures.
        
             | StavrosK wrote:
             | Reload was up/down.
        
             | leokennis wrote:
             | I was an avid Opera user around 2004. True MDI interface,
             | mouse gestures...come to think of it, that was the peak of
             | my web browsing.
             | 
             | Sure, my current browser supports the latest web standards
             | that enable great things and sure, my internet speed is a
             | lot higher. But just from a "browsing the web" perspective,
             | Opera was the high point.
        
             | jbverschoor wrote:
             | I think that came during the period of Black & White by
             | Lionhead Studios. (which was a milestone in using gestures
             | to cast spells by swirly your mouse around)
        
               | danielscrubs wrote:
               | They where released within one month of each other.
        
               | slightwinder wrote:
               | And Opera openly admitted that they copied B&W there,
               | because they considered it a very useful feature. It even
               | came in a sub-version, which at that time was somewhat
               | unusual for such an important feature.
        
             | joshuaissac wrote:
             | > right click drag left to go back, right click... swirl?
             | to reload
             | 
             | I still customise my Chrome and Firefox mouse gestures add-
             | ons to work exactly this way, despite having long forgotten
             | where those conventions originally came from.
             | 
             | Other gestures I have, probably also from Opera:
             | 
             | DL: Left tab
             | 
             | RL: Right tab
             | 
             | D: Page Down
             | 
             | U: Page Up
             | 
             | RLR: Close tab/window
        
               | AfterShave wrote:
               | Mouse gestures, right click scroll between tabs, closed
               | tab history & current tab history. I thank Opera for
               | showing me the way.
               | 
               | Sadly the last two were killed off in Firefox in that
               | last big add-on update. I didn't find anything that works
               | since then.
        
         | thunderbong wrote:
         | I still use Opera 12, by the way. Works fine for about 75% of
         | the web. For the remaining, I use Vivaldi!
        
           | iforgotpassword wrote:
           | Not my experience. I use it out of nostalgia, but only for
           | select sites. Many sites with modern SSL config won't load.
           | Click a random link that lands you on a js-heavy site and the
           | browser will stutter or often crash. Which is impressive
           | because back in the day opera once had the fastest js engine
           | by a mile. Goes to show how far V8 has come.
           | 
           | But browsing traditional sites that just have a little bit of
           | js and are mostly static still feel faster to navigate on
           | this 8 year old browser than the most recent chrome.
        
             | thunderbong wrote:
             | Well, I browse without Javascript, so maybe that's why it
             | works.
             | 
             | And I've got a keyboard shortcut to open the current site
             | in Vivaldi as a fallback.
        
         | krisgenre wrote:
         | Also, during the days of Symbian OS Opera Mini was the best
         | mobile browser available. I remember logging into my bank
         | account and actually doing a transaction on my Nokia N73
         | running Opera Mini.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | > Unfortunately with HTML5 and the Chrome-ification of the web,
         | it couldn't keep up :-(
         | 
         | One of the worst things to happen to the web was for Google to
         | start pushing at a speed and scale only they could keep up
         | with.
         | 
         | The web is theirs now.
        
         | grishka wrote:
         | > Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I
         | think it's going to be too hard to do it.
         | 
         | Oh, it's definitely recreating the experience of Opera. You
         | encounter an annoying bug, you report it to their private bug
         | tracker, and then they'll fix it in two years. Maybe. If you're
         | lucky. And you don't get to know its status in the meantime.
         | And the macOS version still feels like an afterthought
         | sometimes.
         | 
         | Still better than Chrome and by far better than Safari.
        
           | fyhn wrote:
           | I dunno, I've submitted four bugs. One solved within a day,
           | one after 20 days, and two still unresolved as far as I know.
           | It could of course be better, I don't think it's quite like
           | you describe.
        
             | the-dude wrote:
             | Those two remaining bugs still have the opportunity to be
             | resolved after only 2 years. Or 4.
        
           | lucideer wrote:
           | > _they 'll fix it in two years_
           | 
           | Seems pretty quick, at least compared to Chromium / Firefox
           | ;)
           | 
           | > _you don 't get to know its status in the meantime_
           | 
           | Toward the end of Opera's life (pre v15) either an employee
           | or a member of the community (can't remember which) did
           | actually set up a public bug tracker tracking the status of
           | publicly-reported bugs. It didn't show comments or anything
           | like that: just the original bug description, report date &
           | status. So that was... something at least.
           | 
           | They did also give private bug tracker access to a subset of
           | community members, by invite.
        
             | grishka wrote:
             | Yeah you can still ask people who have access to look up
             | the status of a bug for you[1]. It just feels so needlessly
             | convoluted. Since they're already using Jira, it shouldn't
             | be too hard to set it up with proper access controls so you
             | could see your own tickets, at least. They must have some
             | reason to not do this.
             | 
             | [1] https://habr.com/ru/company/vivaldi/blog/561834/#commen
             | t_231... (in Russian)
        
               | rasz wrote:
               | Amount of years old bugs with zero activity while they
               | keep working on new features.
               | 
               | Opera/Vivaldi CEO is really adamant about hiding both
               | staff and user counts. Vivaldi even removed itself from
               | User Agent string.
        
               | starik36 wrote:
               | If memory serves, they removed the user agent because one
               | of the Google properties was serving it substandard
               | HTML/JS even though they use the Chromium engine.
        
               | fifilura wrote:
               | Yes that is likely the case.
               | 
               | All browsers wants to use a unique user agent.
               | 
               | It is the only way to prove market share => $$$.
               | 
               | But it is ridiculously difficult to modify it without
               | breaking sites.
               | 
               | Take a look at your own user agent.
               | 
               | It is likely it identifies itself as
               | gecko/mozilla/chrome/safari/IE/KHTML all in one.
        
           | eloisant wrote:
           | That's because Opera (and now Vivalvi) cares more about
           | building as many features as possible than stability or even
           | consistency of the experience.
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | I guess I had it good, I was using the Windows and Linux
           | Opera versions. The Windows version was always solid.
        
             | pentagone wrote:
             | I used it exclusively for about a year (iirc) on Linux and
             | had only some minor crashes. When they switched to Chromium
             | I switched to Firefox and never had a single crash since.
             | (It's not only luck, I disable all the feature-creep I know
             | of in about:config)
        
             | grishka wrote:
             | I vividly remember how it took them several months to make
             | Opera display Flash content correctly (at 2x scale instead
             | of a blurry upscaled-after-rasterization mess) on retina
             | displays when I just bought my macbook. Other browsers had
             | it done in a matter of weeks, days if you installed a beta
             | build. And that was 2012, back when flash was an essential
             | part of the web.
        
               | easytiger wrote:
               | Well the first release of Opera with chromium was 2013 so
               | it was clearly being abandoned at that stage
        
               | httpsterio wrote:
               | Flash was not an essential part of the web in 2012.
               | Maybe, if you had some weird work tool you had to use,
               | some video players on the web but that was mostly it. In
               | 2012 flash for Android was killed and it was very well
               | known that it was going out of the window in the near
               | future.
        
               | grishka wrote:
               | Many video players were still using flash. VKontakte
               | still had its flash app/game platform going strong,
               | though you did have the option of using an iframe that
               | loaded a web app from your server instead. Flash support
               | was only discontinued there around several years ago.
        
               | httpsterio wrote:
               | I personally remember being rather annoyed when our uni
               | project in 2012 had to be built with Flash and AS3 as it
               | was well known that flash would get the axe in a few
               | years.
               | 
               | We had the option to use JS as well but it wasn't in the
               | curriculum and 4 out my 5 person team didn't want to do
               | any of the extra work.
               | 
               | Even if Flash was used, it was mostly video players and
               | some online games (like Newgrounds). I think YouTube came
               | out with their HTML5 player in 2012 so Flash was
               | definitely moving into a more niche status and I don't
               | consider it essential after Flash based sites went out of
               | fashion (which was closer to 2008-2009. HTML5, ECMA5 and
               | CSS3 (or just HTML, JS and CSS as it's known today)
               | largely made flash redundant before 2012.
        
               | addicted wrote:
               | There;s a difference between still being around and being
               | an "essential part" of the web.
               | 
               | Flash was almost certainly not an essential part of the
               | web. 2012 was 5 years after the iPhone and by then
               | Android and iPhone constituted the majority of web
               | browsing, and neither supported flash at all.
               | 
               | You couldn't very well say something was an essential
               | part of the web if it wasnt supported on those devices in
               | 2012.
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | pbsb wrote:
         | Kind of off topic, but what do you mean by chrome-ification of
         | the web?
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | Chrome is taking over the web and a ton of features start/are
           | only in Chrome. Youtube had a "bug" which made it 2x slower
           | in Firefox, for example.
        
             | takeda wrote:
             | Yep, it's the IE thing all over again.
        
         | pjs_ wrote:
         | Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those
         | programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
         | 
         | - Jamie Zawinski
        
         | metalliqaz wrote:
         | What do you mean "on top of web techs"? Aren't all browsers web
         | techs...??
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | The Opera UI was built using Qt widgets. So native, C++ code.
           | The Vivaldi UI is built using React, I think.
           | 
           | Native UIs are much faster than web UIs, for example.
        
             | metalliqaz wrote:
             | doesn't this also apply to Firefox?
        
           | hansel_der wrote:
           | 'modern' browsers use/incorporate a lot of the tech that is
           | used to build web-sites(-apps). i.e. convergence of content
           | and presentation
        
         | littlecranky67 wrote:
         | Loved Opera back in the day. It had "page specific settings"
         | that would let me allow to set HTTP/Socks5 proxies on a per-
         | page setting - today you cannot even set a proxy anymore
         | without changing your system settings (not browser settings).
         | 
         | If anyone asks, I used this heavily to bypass country
         | blocks/redirects on a per-page level and also with privoxy on
         | some privacy invading sites.
        
           | mobilio wrote:
           | I still miss Opera 12.16...
        
           | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
           | foxyproxy does this. i set up a ssh passthrough and routed
           | foxyproxy with only specifed pages to use local proxy which
           | meant they would be routed through the ssh. it worked for
           | what i wanted
        
             | herjazz wrote:
             | I miss Proxomitron
        
           | gsich wrote:
           | Firefox has proxy settings. Socks5 is bugged though. Doesn't
           | support user/password authentication.
        
           | 0ld wrote:
           | > today you cannot even set a proxy anymore without changing
           | your system settings (not browser settings).
           | 
           | you can in firefox settings
           | 
           | you can also do it in chrome with the cli parameter --proxy-
           | server
        
             | pantulis wrote:
             | > you can in firefox settings
             | 
             | Obviously a remnant from the Netscape codebase. They will
             | fix it.
        
         | JohnWhigham wrote:
         | Forgot to mention that China owns them, so say goodbye to data
         | privacy.
        
         | Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
         | Just to clarify in case someone's wondering, a browser named
         | Opera still exists and gets updated now, but neither the people
         | behind it nor the underlying technology are the same as in the
         | old Opera this post is referring to.
         | 
         | As an old-time classic Opera user since version 5 or so, I do
         | use the current Opera because I find it somewhat better than
         | Chrome (it has more built-in stuff, including mouse gestures,
         | Whatsapp/Telegram support, etc. I hate the barebones
         | browser+extensions model) but unfortunately it's miles behind
         | the old Opera experience.
         | 
         | I have also tried Vivaldi, and while it's a worthy effort, I'm
         | sure many people will love it and I recommend trying it, it's
         | missing one of the Opera characteristics I valued the most:
         | Opera had practically zero UI lag/latency, whereas Vivaldi is
         | rather slow, as the parent post says.
        
           | Bayart wrote:
           | Vivaldi is exactly as slow or fast as any Chromium-based
           | browser. A this point I've surrendered to the notion of the
           | web never getting faster, but just eating away any efficiency
           | gains in computing.
           | 
           | I like Vivaldi for the feature set. It's rich enough for the
           | regular power-user, but the presentation is straightforward
           | enough that you don't feel like you need to pimp your browser
           | like you would Emacs. I felt home with Opera, and I feel home
           | with Vivaldi now.
        
             | bugfix wrote:
             | There is a noticeable delay when opening a new window or
             | moving a tab out of the main window. This happens instantly
             | on Chrome/Edge/Brave.
             | 
             | I've tried switching to Vivaldi at least 5 times since
             | release, but can't get used to this delay.
        
             | rasz wrote:
             | Fullscreen takes ~1 second in Vivaldi. Closing a Tab takes
             | 300-1000ms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCA2qIIG1M
        
               | kunagi7 wrote:
               | Try the same test with Vivaldi 3.7, 3.8 or 4.0... They've
               | optimized the browser interactions quite dramatically so
               | it's much faster than the video shows. But... It's still
               | slower than Chromium's UI.
        
               | Bayart wrote:
               | You're absolutely right, the painting, or whatever you
               | call that, of the UI elements of Vivaldi itself are
               | definitely sluggish.
               | 
               | I was thinking of the normal in-page stuff. My apologies
               | if I misled anyone.
        
             | arp242 wrote:
             | > Vivaldi is exactly as slow or fast as any Chromium-based
             | browser.
             | 
             | That is not my experience at all. I tried a few different
             | versions over the years (including the beta with the mail
             | client, but not yet this 4.0) and the UI always _feels_ ...
             | slow, and not quite snappy enough to be comfterable. It 's
             | really hard to describe this and I'm not the kind of person
             | who quickly gets annoyed by this sort of thing, but for me
             | personally it's too much and every time I tried it it was
             | annoying enough to give up after a day or two. It's like
             | using some remote connection with X or vnc (okay, maybe not
             | quite _that_ bad, but definitely reminiscent of that).
             | 
             | In comparison, Chromium or Firefox doesn't have this at all
             | on the same computer.
             | 
             | Maybe it's a Linux thing; I don't know. I can imagine it's
             | not the highest priority for them. A lot of it seems in the
             | UI layer (and not the rendering layer), which is vastly
             | different from Chromium. I hope they will improve this at
             | some point (and I'll try out this version, too) because
             | outside of this Vivaldi looks pretty neat.
             | 
             | I still miss Opera Presto :-(
        
           | taylodl wrote:
           | As someone who now uses Vivaldi as their daily driver I can
           | vouch that it's a bit slow, especially on older hardware.
           | Obviously it's not intolerable, but it would be nice to see
           | some improvements in that area.
        
             | rasz wrote:
             | If you ever get curious how can UI be so slow, after all
             | "its just js, js is fast", here is how they handle closing
             | browser Tabs currently:
             | 
             | https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/nrasof/fix
             | _...
             | 
             | tldr: Tab bar is just a DIV full of SPANs, one SPAN per
             | Tab. Pages are in a list of DIVs containing iframes.
             | Switching a Tab is a simple process of moving "active"
             | class from one SPAN to another and changing style of one
             | iframe to "visibility: hidden; z-index: -1;" while another
             | one gets "visibility: inherit; z-index: initial;". So far
             | so ~good. So how does Vivaldi handle Tab close? You would
             | guess closing a Tab would entail                   -
             | switching iframe visibility away from Tab being closed
             | first - instant visual feedback for the user         -
             | removing SPAN representing Tab we want closed         -
             | maybe fixing widths of remaining SPANs
             | 
             | What actually happens is a horror show normally reserved
             | for second semester CS students trying OOP for the first
             | time. List of all Tabs gets traversed multiple times, most
             | of them rewritten couple of times, everything generating
             | individual DOM changes.
             | 
             | 10 Tabs open and you close the first one = ~30 DOM Reflows.
             | 
             | 100 Tabs open and you close two in the middle = ~300 DOM
             | Reflows.
             | 
             | 100 Tabs open and you close first 10 = ~3000 DOM Reflows.
             | 
             | Stuttering UI is the staple of Vivaldi, codebase is full of
             | functions running in linear/polynomial time to the number
             | of Tabs open/Tab position on the list, in places where O(1)
             | is trivial. Vivaldi is a browser that used to Resize
             | contents of every single Tab opened when you resized its
             | window - resizing was slower the more Tabs you had in Tab
             | bar :o, going fullscreen could take 10 seconds.
        
               | taylodl wrote:
               | That's _AWFUL_! But it does explain things...
        
               | siproprio wrote:
               | I always thought they're slow because of JavaScript, but
               | not because of crappy code!
               | 
               | That actually explains a lot.
               | 
               | It would be interesting to know if they lose a lot of
               | users because of slowness, but since it hasn't been
               | fixed, I guess they don't?
        
         | drdavid wrote:
         | The Vivaldi mail thing must have been in the works for a while.
         | Since very early on, they offered an email address at their
         | .net domain. It wasn't integrated or an email client, but they
         | had that aspect setup early on.
        
         | 55555 wrote:
         | I use a browser probably 12 hours per day. Maybe there's enough
         | people willing to pay a dollar or two a month for that to be a
         | possible business model again.
        
           | scroot wrote:
           | Though I'm not sure what they are up to exactly, isn't this
           | what The Browser Company [1] is trying to do?
           | 
           | [1] https://thebrowser.company/
        
           | 0x49d1 wrote:
           | They've actually added option for donations:
           | https://vivaldi.com/contribute/
        
           | awful_waffle wrote:
           | This honestly sounds like a great idea. At this point I'd pay
           | money for a browser that was private, fast, and dev-friendly,
           | simply to avoid the moral dilemma of switching from FF to a
           | Chrome clone.
        
             | todd3834 wrote:
             | Is Safari an option for you? (Mac?)
        
               | kristofferR wrote:
               | Safari is about the least dev friendly browser there is.
               | Their API support is atrocious, especially for web
               | extensions.
        
             | CaptainZapp wrote:
             | What's wrong with Firefox?
             | 
             | It's an honest question, since as a user I really love it.
             | Is it the 'dev-friendly', which Firefox lacks?
        
               | awful_waffle wrote:
               | FF is my daily driver (since Quantum in '17) but I've
               | found it really just isn't holding up these days:
               | 
               | * Profiling functions between Chrome/FF reveals that
               | Chrome is frequently considerably faster (usually 60%+)
               | 
               | * During WebGL work I'll often hit blue screens around
               | memory management (this seems to be a relatively recent
               | development)
               | 
               | * Similarly, trying to profile a WebRTC application with
               | video feeds will consistently trigger a blue screen. (I
               | can tell this is from FF, as the browser itself flashes
               | white a few times before the system goes down.)
               | 
               | * Things like the UI changing - while minor - are enough
               | to cause inconvenience, plus the occasional random
               | feature removal (View Image context menu option)
               | indicates that I'm not necessarily the target audience
               | for the browser.
               | 
               | I actually slightly prefer the devtools in FF than
               | Chrome, but there are a number of quirks that have
               | started appearing over the past year or so, ranging from
               | actual bugs to just weird UX.
               | 
               | As I write this, I'm realizing I'd love a browser that's
               | seen more as a devtool than a catch-all web navigator
               | which happens to have a profiler built in.
        
               | CaptainZapp wrote:
               | Thanks. You make a few interesting points. It just
               | doesn't seem to hit me so bad as an average user.
               | 
               | I actually liked the UI they implemented in Android.
               | Alas, I seem to be in a minority
        
               | awful_waffle wrote:
               | I actually quite like the mobile browser, it hasn't
               | really given me any issues yet. The fact it supports add-
               | ons like uBlock is awesome.
        
               | cpeterso wrote:
               | If WebGL and WebRTC are causing bluescreens, that is
               | probably a GPU driver bug (though I realize that users
               | don't care whose fault a crash is). If you have steps to
               | reproduce, even if not 100% reliable, you can file a
               | Firefox bug in Bugzilla. Mozilla has contacts at
               | Microsoft and can pass along the bug.
        
               | m45t3r wrote:
               | Yeah, no user application should cause a blue screen of
               | death or kernel panic under normal circumstances, unless
               | it is either a bug or they're messing with something from
               | the kernel (but in this last case, you generally need to
               | run the program with high privilege anyway).
        
               | jbnjkkm wrote:
               | The new UI overhaul looks awful, they killed most useful
               | plugins with the big update awhile back, and
               | ideologically/politically Mozilla has become equivalent
               | to an impoverished Google so personally speaking I'm
               | horny for something new in the browser space
        
               | jamespo wrote:
               | There are salty power users of the old insecure XUL based
               | plugins who can't let their deprecation go.
        
               | dvdkon wrote:
               | I'm salty because WebExtensions _still_ can 't do
               | something as seemingly simple as bind global keybindings
               | years after the transition. I actually supported the
               | switch, but back then I was optimistic about missing
               | features being added soon.
        
               | arendtio wrote:
               | My biggest issue is, running it with a 4k resolution on
               | Windows seems to be considerably slower than Chrome
               | (Intel graphics). With a full-hd resolution I didn't
               | notice the difference and on a different PC running Linux
               | I don't have any performance issues either.
        
               | lkozma wrote:
               | One small thing in the latest redesign: if you have two
               | tabs, one active, one not, the visual cues suggest
               | exactly the opposite. The active one seems like a
               | clickable button, the inactive one seems pushed down and
               | not clickable.
               | 
               | After misclicking hundreds of times, I still couldn't
               | train myself to go against my perception and follow the
               | designer's "bold vision", using it feels like writing
               | with my left hand or steering a bicycle with a crooked
               | wheel.
        
               | kome wrote:
               | ah then i'm not the only one. i had to change color
               | scheme.
        
               | jamespo wrote:
               | Might want to check https://color.firefox.com
        
               | SekstiNi wrote:
               | This is the way. Additionally I went into about:config
               | and set browser.proton.enabled to false, which fixed most
               | of the issues I had with the new design.
        
           | kordlessagain wrote:
           | If it had a decent search agent in it, without ads, I'd pay
           | for it.
           | 
           | Because, let's be honest, advertising sucks and anyone that
           | thinks advertising and search belong together sucks even
           | more.
        
             | kmonsen wrote:
             | This is what neeva tries to do, it's currently free in
             | beta.
        
         | mcintyre1994 wrote:
         | Opera had some ridiculously powerful keyboard shortcuts and
         | performance as well for the time. I used to play this web game
         | years ago and past beginner level the only way to compete was
         | to use Opera because you could use a combination of keyboard
         | shortcuts to send attacks/defences from multiple tabs within
         | milliseconds.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | FlyingSnake wrote:
       | I'm a long time Firefox user and I still use Firefox for personal
       | use. However my workspace is Google Heavy and Google Meet is a
       | 2nd class citizen on FF. I hate chrome, and Vivaldi is the best
       | blink based browser that fills this niche. I just love the tree-
       | style tabs and Vivaldi was the only blink based browser that
       | provided that. I really love it so far, and it's perfect for my
       | use case.
        
       | ACS_Solver wrote:
       | I want to offer Vivaldi some praise, I switched to it as my main
       | browser a few years ago, and it's been great. I had to look for a
       | new browser when Firefox (that I had used since the Firebird
       | days) kept breaking my settings and plugins with their updates.
       | After yet another Firefox update I wasn't able to restore the
       | browser to how I want it to be, so I tried Vivaldi.
       | 
       | I'm not even a big fan of the original Opera, but love Vivaldi's
       | features such as easy screen splitting between two tabs and one-
       | click actions to disable images or apply certain filters to a
       | page. Picture-in-picture and pop-outs for media are also great,
       | periodic tab reload is occasionally very useful.
       | 
       | Ideally I'd like to use a fully FOSS browser, but my patience
       | with Firefox ran out, and Vivaldi is Chromium + custom open-
       | source parts + closed-source UI layer. Good enough for me, though
       | not ideal.
        
         | kjakm wrote:
         | I hadn't even thought of tab tiling as a feature I might need
         | until now. Just took a look and seems incredibly useful!
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | thefz wrote:
         | To me tab tiling is invaluable. I just wish it had session
         | syncing, that would be great. I use Vivaldi a lot.
        
           | thunderbong wrote:
           | Vivaldi does have session syncing.
        
         | hulitu wrote:
         | Also Vivaldi is faster.
        
           | alpaca128 wrote:
           | I find this statement a bit puzzling. Vivaldi is the slowest
           | browser I've tried in recent years. The couple times I used
           | it I always went back to Firefox after a few weeks because I
           | couldn't stand the sluggish UI anymore. Maybe it improved by
           | now, but I find it hard to believe it's now supposed to be
           | faster after Firefox' massive performance updates.
        
             | salmo wrote:
             | It's weird how this cycles. Firebird/Firefox was originally
             | an amazingly light browser (discounting some niche Linux
             | ones that embedded Gecko).
             | 
             | Then it got huge, and Chrome was amazing. And it seemed
             | impossible for FF to be able to work out the technical
             | debt.
             | 
             | Now Chrome often makes the fan kick in on my MBP and
             | Firefox is lighter again in CPU and memory.
             | 
             | I think Safari is probably best in this regard on this
             | machine, but I just don't enjoy using it. Not sure why.
             | Maybe I'm old and it's just change.
             | 
             | Sadly, I did hit my first work website that only worked in
             | Chrome this week. No FF, no Safari.
        
               | toyg wrote:
               | _> I think Safari is probably best in this regard on this
               | machine, but I just don't enjoy using it_
               | 
               | Safari always gives me the feeling of being too basic.
               | The extension ecosystem is very small, and settings
               | panels try their hardest not to actually give you any
               | options beyond the essential ones. It's a browser for
               | people who _endure_ the web, not enjoy it.
        
               | chipotle_coyote wrote:
               | I don't think your last sentence is a particularly
               | generous summation. :)
               | 
               | Maybe I'm an anomaly in the HN crowd, but I never really
               | got into extensions even when I was using Firefox or
               | Chrome as a daily driver. I have an extension for
               | 1Password, an extension for a read-it-later service (for
               | years Instapaper, lately GoodLinks), and somewhat
               | grudgingly, an ad blocker. And sometimes a user style
               | sheet extension. I've tried other extensions at various
               | points and they've never really stuck, not even the
               | "vertical tab" style extensions that I want to love but
               | always find ugly and distracting. (OmniWeb, RIP, is the
               | only browser I ever used that had what I thought was a
               | great implementation of this.)
               | 
               | And I use Chrome daily at work now, because there are a
               | few internal sites that require it (and one that
               | inexplicably requires IE 10, which Chrome turns out to be
               | better at faking than Safari), and... it's fine? But it
               | feels just a little slower, it's harder on the battery,
               | and there's very little about it that I miss when I'm
               | back in Safari on my personal Mac. Maybe if I was deep
               | into web development again, this would change, since
               | Safari's dev tools always seem to be a few steps behind
               | Chrome's. Maybe there's some magic can't-live-without
               | extension I could find on Chrome or Firefox that would
               | sway me to stick with one for the long haul. But for
               | years, I've enjoyed the web, and I've enjoyed it on
               | Safari. [shrug emoji]
        
               | handrous wrote:
               | Safari's respect for battery life and ability to limit
               | the harm a misbehaving/disrespectful tab (which is lots
               | of them, these days) can do to overall system
               | responsiveness are what keep me using it, and those
               | definitely help me _enjoy_ the web, to the extent that it
               | can be enjoyed anymore. It 's the best at both of those
               | of any major browser I'm aware of, and in fact I don't
               | know any that are even close--something like Surf might
               | match or beat it, I guess, being very small and using the
               | WebKit as the rendering engine, but I wouldn't bet on it.
               | 
               | [EDIT] but yes, FF and Chrome/Chromium destroy it on a
               | feature basis. I just value those other things _so much_
               | , and both of those options are so bad at those things,
               | that I prefer Safari anyway.
        
               | lucian1900 wrote:
               | I didn't like Safari at first either, but after using it
               | for performance reasons I prefer it in general now.
               | Simple sane UI and it helps that it syncs to my phone and
               | table seamlessly.
        
         | sirius87 wrote:
         | Same. Huge fan of Opera 12, I was active in their community
         | sites and reported bugs when possible. I'm glad to see them all
         | coming back.
         | 
         | I'm skeptical of trusting Vivaldi Sync with my passwords, so
         | that's turned off, but I use Vivaldi on my Linux desktop and
         | Android phone, syncing bookmarks, notes, speed dials. Works
         | great!
         | 
         | It's also hackable in the sense that the browser chrome uses
         | plain old HTML/JS/CSS, so you could literally dive into
         | `/opt/vivaldi/resources/vivaldi/style/common.css` and change
         | the way the browser looks (may have to re-patch after every
         | browser update).
        
           | Bayart wrote:
           | >may have to re-patch after every browser update
           | 
           | I remember having some kind of flag on pacman, back when I
           | was using Arch, to do that automagically.
        
             | sirius87 wrote:
             | I'm on an Ubuntu based system, so an apt-get Post-Invoke
             | hook would do the job for me [1]. I haven't bothered
             | though. I just manually run a bash script that appends my
             | !important changes to the end of the file.
             | 
             | But apparently there's an official way to apply CSS mods
             | using vivaldi://experiments/ and Settings > Appearance
             | 
             | [1] https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-linux-hook-
             | a-scr...
        
       | eingaeKaiy8ujie wrote:
       | A closed source browser? lol
        
       | Vinnl wrote:
       | Off-topic, but: does anyone know how Vivaldi is funded? I tried
       | looking for it for a bit, but couldn't find any income streams.
        
         | haunter wrote:
         | First hit in Google
         | 
         | https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
        
           | csabakissi wrote:
           | that link doesn't work: Error establishing a database
           | connection
        
             | henryackerman wrote:
             | Seems like the website was hugged to death...
        
             | ivanbakel wrote:
             | You can access the archived version: https://web.archive.or
             | g/web/20210506194445/https://vivaldi.c...
             | 
             | The short version is: they get money from things like
             | search engine deals, which guide Vivaldi users to third-
             | party services.
        
               | vorticalbox wrote:
               | The ad blocker is also set up to allow ads that support
               | vivaldi by default.
        
             | oblio wrote:
             | It did work before we killed it. HN (and other news sites)
             | hugged the Vivaldi site to death :-D
        
           | yunohn wrote:
           | They spoke about this business model in the release post too.
           | 
           | I'm just finding it really hard to believe that it's
           | sustainable and makes them enough money to run a team...
        
             | lucideer wrote:
             | > _I'm just finding it really hard to believe that it's
             | sustainable and makes them enough money to run a team..._
             | 
             | Firefox is funded the same way, and they seem to have
             | plenty of income...
        
               | yunohn wrote:
               | Firefox makes the vast majority of that income via their
               | Google partnership. Vivaldi claims they do not get paid
               | by Google.
        
               | kingofclams wrote:
               | I'm not sure, but I have a feeling the majority of
               | Vivaldi users wouldn't be using google
        
               | yunohn wrote:
               | Frankly speaking, I'm pretty sure most users of both
               | Firefox and Vivaldi are using Google.
               | 
               | But my point was more around how the minimal amount of
               | money coming from other search engines or sponsored
               | bookmarks can't sustain a browser dev team.
        
               | zamadatix wrote:
               | There were a couple years recently Firefox was primarily
               | sponsored by either Yahoo or Bing (can't remember which)
               | and that deal supported the entire Mozilla foundation
               | same as the Google deal as well as Firefox (which also
               | makes their own browser back end) not just a browser
               | front-end dev team.
               | 
               | So there are definitely other decent sources of income
               | besides Google for these deals and since it's a
               | significantly more focused organization it doesn't seem
               | implausible to me.
        
               | yunohn wrote:
               | These deals are based on market share, user activity and
               | usage, and so on. No search engine is paying Vivaldi as
               | much money as Yahoo or Google did to Firefox. It would be
               | laughable to expect that kind of sponsor money for a
               | niche browser that also reduces ad tracking. That's how
               | these things work.
        
               | zamadatix wrote:
               | It'd be laughable to expect Vivaldi needs the exact same
               | 600 million dollar search deal that floats the entire
               | Mozilla foundation to fund a custom Chromium UI.
               | 
               | As I said, there are definitely other decent sources of
               | income besides Google for these deals and since it's a
               | significantly more focused organization it doesn't seem
               | implausible to me.
        
               | addicted wrote:
               | It was Yahoo.
               | 
               | But here's why there's confusion. Yahoo search at the
               | time (or shortly before or after) switched to using
               | Bing's search and ad engine.
        
               | lucideer wrote:
               | Firefox makes the majority of that income via their
               | Google partnership _today_. Recently, the majority of it
               | was coming from Yahoo.
               | 
               | The browser's market share will ultimately determine the
               | market value of the search partnership, so Vivaldi will
               | likely have a much lower income from it than Firefox, but
               | it's in no way limited by whether they partner with
               | Google or with any other search provider. For a smaller
               | more efficient team, not maintaining their own browser
               | engine, it could easily compare in sustainability to
               | Firefox's income stream.
        
           | Vinnl wrote:
           | Haha, that'll teach me for thinking I can find information
           | just by browsing through the menu items. Thanks!
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | asutekku wrote:
         | They at least have some sponsored bookmarks if you don't
         | configure them bt yourself.
        
         | lightdot wrote:
         | By merchadising their produc... er... users! :)
         | 
         | That being said, according to their blog, browser users aren't
         | tracked or profiled by Vivaldi.
         | 
         | They claim to make money from search engine partner deals and
         | from bookmark partner deals. And to be honest, I have no reason
         | to think that the statement isn't true.
        
         | roachpepe wrote:
         | If it's free, then you're the product. Or will eventually be,
         | plenty of projects have started out with good intentions and a
         | noble cause only to be ultimately bought out, userbase and all.
         | Creating something like Vivaldi 4.0 is not cheap, someone has
         | poured cash in - who that is, I think the end-user should be
         | entitled to know.
        
       | apocolyps6 wrote:
       | I really want to like Vivaldi. It's the only browser (afaik) that
       | supports tabs on the side. Right now I use "Tree Style Tabs" on
       | Firefox with some custom CSS to get rid of the original tab bar.
       | 
       | Unfortunately I get a massive delay when fullscreening youtube
       | videos in Vivaldi. The video first maximizes to the left half of
       | my screen, and only then expands to the whole thing. Sadly a
       | dealbreaker. FWIW its a little faster if I have the browser
       | already maximized.
        
         | keithnz wrote:
         | edge supports vertical tabs
        
           | jjjdjjddddsfsd wrote:
           | I switched from Vivaldi to Edge because unfortunately Vivaldi
           | become unusably slow for me beyond a certain amount of open
           | tabs (hopefully just a bug they'll fix eventually).
           | 
           | I miss the little search bar for tabs that Vivaldi shows in
           | the vertical tabs view.
        
           | vitorsr wrote:
           | To complement:
           | 
           | Since as early as October 2020 on testing [1] and as early as
           | January 2021 on stable [2].
           | 
           | [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/vertical-
           | tab...
           | 
           | [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-
           | edge-r...
        
       | nik736 wrote:
       | It's down.
        
         | smarx007 wrote:
         | HN hug :)
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20210609074720/https://vivaldi.c...
        
           | mxcrossr wrote:
           | I'm kind of surprised HN could take them down
        
       | throw737858 wrote:
       | I think it follows spirit of old Opera 12 very well. It is even
       | opensource (kind of).
        
         | rplnt wrote:
         | For true old Opera experience there's Otter.
         | 
         | https://otter-browser.org/
         | 
         | But it's being developed by a very small community, and
         | probably can't keep up, haven't tried it in a while.
        
       | inter_netuser wrote:
       | website is down.
       | 
       | how much spyware is in their browser? is it fully open sourced?
        
         | j_koreth wrote:
         | I'm not aware of any spyware in the browser.
         | 
         | I believe the source is online but not licensed under a free
         | license (Someone is free to correct me on that).
        
           | chucky wrote:
           | The browser engine, being a Chromium variant, is open-
           | sourced. The source code for the UI is not available under an
           | open source license it seems:
           | https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-
           | sou...
        
             | dagurp wrote:
             | More on the subject https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-
             | browser-open-source/
        
       | edu wrote:
       | It's down, archive:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20210609074720/https://vivaldi.c...
        
       | 627467 wrote:
       | I love the tiling capabilities of Vivaldi, it's been impressing
       | people over videoconference too.
       | 
       | I tried to use built in mail and calendar, but unfortunately my
       | (work) life is too dependent on the little integrationa of Google
       | calendar and gmail
        
       | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
       | Not going to download it just to find out that they didn't bother
       | supporting Office365.
        
         | diveanon wrote:
         | Don't blame them, office365 is a pain in the ass to support.
        
           | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
           | I know. That's why I wrote the comment.
           | 
           | There's honestly very little value in yet another IMAP
           | client. Fixing a little bit the broken ecosystems around
           | Exchange would be a million times more useful to the world.
        
         | oblio wrote:
         | Talk about entitlement.
         | 
         | 1. It's a beta product.
         | 
         | 2. It's free.
         | 
         | 3. They support IMAP/POP3 so you can make do with that for now.
        
       | amyjess wrote:
       | Have the Vivaldi developers confirmed whether or not they'll
       | continue supporting Manifestv2? I think I heard something along
       | those lines but I Can't remember where.
        
       | kitd wrote:
       | I use Vivaldi regularly for one reason: my company has disabled
       | access to the developer tools on Chrome and FF. With Vivaldi
       | (being Chromium) I have full access again!
       | 
       | Just don't tell them I told you ...
        
         | amitport wrote:
         | what was the company's reasoning to disable access to the
         | developer tools on Chrome and FF? why?
        
           | kitd wrote:
           | I don't have the precise wording to hand but it was along the
           | lines of "security, protecting assets, etc, etc"
        
         | e3bc54b2 wrote:
         | My company does this too. Try installing Firefox in a
         | nonstandard location, that fixed it for me. Now I enjoy regex
         | search, unlock origin and tampermonkey and have little more
         | peace of mind.
        
           | everybodyknows wrote:
           | >regex search
           | 
           | Meaning search over within browser window i.e. "Find in
           | Page"?
        
       | traveler01 wrote:
       | I like Vivaldi but I do enjoy using my main browser also for web
       | development. BUT, they do a browser for power users but couldn't
       | care less with developers since they haven't fixed the broken
       | responsive mode in the developer tools.
       | 
       | Gonna keep using Brave...
        
       | rob74 wrote:
       | One killer feature for Vivaldi Mail would be supporting M$ two-
       | factor authentication. Since my company made Exchange 2FA
       | mandatory, I had to give up Thunderbird and use the Outlook 365
       | web interface due to lack of alternatives under Linux. That would
       | definitely be in the spirit of giving you an alternative to Big
       | Tech (at least on the client side). But I'm not sure if it's even
       | doable though?!
        
       | rplnt wrote:
       | I really tried to like Vivaldi, and it could be a good browser,
       | but is so unbearably slow. The whole UI is unresponsive. Opening
       | a new tab can take almost a second. Price for javascript apps I
       | guess.
       | 
       | edit for clarification: This was on OSX, on Windows it was OK.
       | 
       | Used it for almost a year as a secondary browser, no change, gave
       | up.
        
         | kunagi7 wrote:
         | After the 3.7 release they've improved UI responsiveness quite
         | dramatically. In my laptop (i5, 8200U), opening a new tab or
         | settings used to take 1 to 2 seconds, but now it hovers around
         | 250~300ms.
        
         | grishka wrote:
         | I found a bug that slowed it down a great deal. It was the fact
         | that they put multiple `filter` styles onto the tabs, even when
         | those filters did nothing useful. It was still extremely taxing
         | on the GPU driver.
         | 
         | But, since you can customize the UI with your own CSS (there's
         | a hidden setting you need to enable first, in
         | vivaldi://experiments), I put a simple `* {filter: none
         | !important}` in there. After I did, it felt as if I bought a
         | new computer.
         | 
         | The fun part? They still haven't acknowledged it. Even after I
         | gave them the exact steps to fix it.
        
           | dagurp wrote:
           | Where did you report it? I'd like to take a look.
        
             | grishka wrote:
             | VB-60356
        
           | Matthias1 wrote:
           | I just did some tests and was unable to replicate your
           | results. I'm on an i5 2019 Mac, and Vivaldi takes about 200ms
           | to open a tab, with or without CSS filters. (200ms is
           | bearable, but it is slower than I would like.) I have
           | Hardware Acceleration on and Use Animation off.
        
           | silentbugs wrote:
           | Which part exactly is being slowed down by these filters?
           | Could you post a link to the bug report if it's public?
        
             | grishka wrote:
             | I'm not sure about the internals, but when those filters
             | are there, the GPU process causes a lot of CPU load on
             | every frame. So much that it often hits 100% of the single
             | core it uses before it's able to draw at 60 fps. Oh and it
             | redraws the tab bar a lot. It redraws it every time you
             | scroll a page, and it continuously redraws it when there's
             | a tab playing audio in order to animate those waves
             | emanating from the speaker icon. Yes, it redraws the entire
             | tab bar for a 16x16 animated icon.
             | 
             | They unfortunately don't have a public bug tracker.
        
               | rasz wrote:
               | Settings/Appearance/Window Appearance: disable "Use
               | animation"
        
           | IlliOnato wrote:
           | Can you give more details? I can see how to enable custom
           | CSS, but where I go from there? Where to put the custom CSS?
        
             | grishka wrote:
             | Settings -> Appearance. There will be a section to choose a
             | folder with your custom css files.
        
               | timothevs wrote:
               | I may be obtuse, but I am not seeing that on Vivaldi 4.0
               | on the Mac?
        
               | grishka wrote:
               | https://i.imgur.com/21ueqSf.png in the lower part of the
               | window (I'm too lazy to switch the language sorry).
               | 
               | You need to restart it for the checkbox to take effect.
        
         | andai wrote:
         | Do you have an older machine, or is it even slow on new
         | machines?
         | 
         | I tried Vivaldi last year on my computer which is about ten
         | years old now. Vivaldi was extremely sluggish (Chrome and
         | Firefox still run fine), I was hoping to come back to it once I
         | upgrade my computer.
        
           | rplnt wrote:
           | It was a relatively new hw, MB Pro 2017. No issues with other
           | browsers.
        
           | hulitu wrote:
           | My experience with an 10 years old computer with win 7 is
           | that firefox is slow and vivaldi is faster. I don't use
           | chrome. On Android vivaldi is much faster than firefox.
        
         | zaphirplane wrote:
         | Is it based on electron. - drum roll - :)
        
           | neolog wrote:
           | That just means it's based on chromium, which makes sense for
           | a browser.
        
             | pantulis wrote:
             | But not that much for a new/mail reader -- even 100% native
             | Mailmate sweats with my 50k message GMail archive. While it
             | may work for casual users, I'm not really that convinced it
             | is the killer feature Vivaldi users are expecting.
        
           | atlemo wrote:
           | No :)
        
         | dartharva wrote:
         | It is indeed bloated. Its main redeeming quality in my opinion
         | was that it was the only chromium-based browser that allowed
         | sideloading extensions freely, but now that's gone too since
         | Chrome and Brave have apparently started allowing it as well.
        
         | globular-toast wrote:
         | Odd because the one thing I remember about Opera from back in
         | the day was how fast it was. This was back when Firefox was
         | king amongst in-the-know users but IE6 was most popular
         | overall. Opera was so much faster and smoother than everything
         | else.
        
           | rplnt wrote:
           | Opera was fast and stable, especially with more tabs open.
           | Way into the Chrome era too. Too bad Google used it's
           | monopoly to drive other browsers to death. Only Firefox
           | survived really.
        
       | hellpirat wrote:
       | Is this super app? Oo
        
       | philonoist wrote:
       | If only we had a Vivaldi based on the Firefox.
        
       | thayne wrote:
       | If Vivaldi were fully open source I would probably use it. But
       | it's not.
        
       | alexyz12 wrote:
       | I wonder how they plan to not become evil? It is explicitly
       | planned or just that they are trying to offer a new alternative
       | to the current evil thats not evil yet? Either one is fine, just
       | wondering out loud.
        
       | shortformblog wrote:
       | Since discussions about the browser's approach to design
       | philosophy and privacy are coming up in this thread, I'll just
       | flag that I did an interview with Jon von Tetzchner earlier this
       | year where he talked about some of those things, as well as the
       | lineage with Opera: https://tedium.co/2021/02/05/vivaldi-browser-
       | history-profile...
        
       | niq999 wrote:
       | Using Vivaldi as my main browser since a few months ago. Tab
       | grouping and tiling is great. The side panel is neat for checking
       | on Skype without installing the app.
       | 
       | I didn't experience any slowdown, but not being able to drag and
       | drop files from downloads is a pain in the ass. It's been brought
       | up on the forums and left at that years ago.
        
       | alichapman wrote:
       | Anyone else getting 500s trying to access this?
        
       | frr149 wrote:
       | From the post:
       | 
       | (...)we offer Vivaldi Translate, a built-in, privacy-friendly
       | translation feature, powered by Lingvanex and _hosted by Vivaldi_
       | , keeping translations _out of the reach of companies like Google
       | or Microsoft_.
       | 
       | Now I'm supposed to trust Vivaldi instead of Google or MS...
       | Stopped reading right there.
        
       | bitigchi wrote:
       | For an open-source recreation of Opera 12, there is Otter:
       | https://otter-browser.org
        
         | warpech wrote:
         | Thanks for the link!
         | 
         | Browsing the source code, I love the author's habit to make a
         | code commit every single day [0]. That looks like a powerful
         | way to move the project forward while avoiding fatigue.
         | 
         | https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser/commits/170f36...
        
         | idoubtit wrote:
         | I used Otter as a second browser for some time, but, despite
         | all my empathy from the project, a few years ago I stopped.
         | 
         | - Installing and upgrading was a pain on Linux, and compiling
         | was even worse. At first there were no AppImage for it. Then
         | they were created but at first they were half-broken (the whole
         | process of creating an AppImage is hacky and Qt projects were
         | especially hard). It seems the AppImage broke again in 2018.
         | 
         | - The web engine comes from Qt. IIRC, it's an old fork of
         | webkit. Many sites were not compatible, and I suspect the
         | situation goes worse with every year.
         | 
         | I recommend trying Otter, but don't expect it to replace your
         | everyday browser.
        
           | bitigchi wrote:
           | It's in the process of switching to QtWebEngine, which is the
           | Chromium version.
        
       | thanatos519 wrote:
       | I'm trying Vivaldi again since as an expat I depend on single-
       | click in-browser translation.
       | 
       | For me, the killer feature is built-in no-nonsense vertical tabs,
       | something I had in Galeon many years ago because it used the Gtk+
       | tab widget. I hate hate hate that Chromium cannot do this,
       | because dogma.
        
         | warpech wrote:
         | FWIW, Microsoft Edge also has vertical tabs.
        
           | thanatos519 wrote:
           | Sorry, you lost me at 'Microsoft'.
        
             | approxim8ion wrote:
             | https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/vivaldi.html
             | 
             | Seems like your bar is low, but not that low.
        
               | fuzzylightbulb wrote:
               | Got anything more current than 2018?
        
               | kunagi7 wrote:
               | The last update was made in 2018. That's a long time. It
               | would be nice to revisit this now that they've have added
               | more services (Mail, translations, expanded Sync) and see
               | their impact to the browser's privacy.
        
             | warpech wrote:
             | Perhaps that was to be expected after you wrote that you
             | used to use Galeon.
        
           | bellyfullofbac wrote:
           | Neat! I'm not the grandparent poster, but I also can't stand
           | horizontal tabs, probably because I'm a tab hoarder. But with
           | screens wider than they are tall, vertical tabs make sense,
           | and each new tab doesn't truncate all other tabs' titles.
           | 
           | I looked up MS Edge's implementation, it seems it only shows
           | the tabs either on top or on the left of the window, with
           | Vivaldi you can set it at any edge of the window, I have mine
           | on the right side.
        
             | thanatos519 wrote:
             | Indeed, for least distraction, content should start at the
             | top left of the screen. For this, I already had my tabs on
             | the right, but now I am trying bookmarks/address bar at the
             | bottom.
             | 
             | Not sure I'll keep it this way ... but what I  about
             | Vivaldi is the choice. If I wanted training wheels, I would
             | already be using macOS.
        
         | gbrhaz wrote:
         | Vertical tabs without the 'tree' aspect (at least when I last
         | used Vivaldi). Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension is still
         | the best option I've found so far.
        
           | mcintyre1994 wrote:
           | I switched from Firefox + Tree Style Tabs to Vivaldi + Tab
           | Stacks and I mostly prefer it. The ability to tile tabs
           | within a group is the killer feature, as well as it being
           | much better supported by being native. Stack by host is great
           | too. The big tradeoff is that you only get one layer of
           | nesting, but I find it's generally worth that tradeoff for
           | me.
        
       | Theizestooke wrote:
       | Does it have the ability to containerize websites, like Firefox
       | does?
        
       | ckotso wrote:
       | I've been using Vivaldi as my main/work browser for the last ~1
       | year. Tab tiling and tab groups have been absolute game changers
       | for my workflow and curbed my objections departing from the
       | firefox camp.
       | 
       | It used to feel quite slow with too many open tabs when I started
       | using it, and would improve by hibernating them every now and
       | then (which is built-in functionality). It seems to have improved
       | significantly with recent releases, haven't had to hibernate tabs
       | for quite some time now.
        
       | amarant wrote:
       | Looks pretty good, but I'm a bit sceptical of the translation
       | feature. They introduce it by saying Google has access to
       | everything you translate, so therefore you should instead use
       | their service, which sends the texts you translate to their
       | servers in Iceland.
       | 
       | The formulations try really hard not to say "trust us with your
       | data instead of big tech", which seems like an attempt to hide
       | the fact that they do have access to everything you translate,
       | much like Google would have... The only question is who you trust
       | more - Vivaldi or Google?
        
         | 1_player wrote:
         | One thing is for sure. Vivaldi isn't in the ad tech business,
         | or if it were it's not the biggest ad tech business in the
         | world, and does not have any precedent in wanting to know
         | everything I do, write, read, search, talk with to build an ad
         | profile.
         | 
         | Who do you trust less with your most personal data - Vivaldi or
         | Google? I think the answer is pretty easy.
         | 
         | It's just that, if you're the average person, you're already
         | being spied upon massively by Google and you're trying to
         | figure out if a company orders of magnitude smaller is a
         | credible threat to your data.
        
         | thanatos519 wrote:
         | Vivaldi.
        
         | kome wrote:
         | vivaldi :)
        
       | j_koreth wrote:
       | I'm surprised it took this long for Vivaldi Mail to come out. I
       | believe it was teased relatively early on in Vivaldi's life
       | although I don't envy the developers that had to work with IMAP.
       | 
       | I am glad to see that some love given to RSS in a browser since
       | it's been marginalized in all mainstream browsers. It's
       | frustrating to see a refuge of decentralized media consumption be
       | thrown away considering privacy concerns.
       | 
       | I am not the biggest fan of the licensing policy along with the
       | inclusion of a third party translating service but I welcome any
       | competition to the market.
        
         | dagurp wrote:
         | The translation service is hosted at Vivaldi
        
         | andris9 wrote:
         | For IMAP they seem to use emailjs-imap-client that is written
         | by myself for Whiteout.io a long time ago. IMAP command tags
         | are still prefixed with `W` that would stand for [W]hiteout.
         | Nice to see my old code being useful :D
        
       | luke2m wrote:
       | Glad to see translation, because I do trust Vivaldi more than
       | Google.
        
       | Renaud wrote:
       | I switched to Vivaldi from Chrome earlier this year as I was
       | uncomfortable with the level of Google integration in that
       | browser.
       | 
       | Vivaldi is based on Chromium and has lots of improvements over
       | Chrome, like gestures out of the box, side panels, lots of clear
       | options. And Chrome extensions work perfectly. I've had no issues
       | so far.
       | 
       | The complexity of managing a browser engine that does what
       | everyone expects requires humongous resources so I can understand
       | the move to Chromium. As long as the google bits are removed and
       | the extensions work, it's great to have an alternative to Edge
       | and Chrome.
       | 
       | I mostly use Firefox as my daily browser and nothing would make
       | me abandon it but it's nice to be able to segregate your various
       | professional/private persona using different browsers.
        
         | ProAm wrote:
         | How are you installing Chrome extensions without signing into
         | Chrome first? I find I cannot install any of them for Vivaldi
         | without signing into Chrome (which sort of defeats the purpose)
        
         | BugWatch wrote:
         | You can always use multiple ("specialized") instances of
         | portable Firefox (with MultipleInstance=true in ini file).
         | That's how I do it, and I've been using portable Firefox
         | versions exclusively for 10+ years, I think.
        
           | Renaud wrote:
           | Thanks for reminding me to try that again.
           | 
           | Last time was a couple of years ago and I had some trouble
           | between instances but maybe I didn't do it right.
        
           | kyoji wrote:
           | You are probably already aware, but there is an official
           | extension that offers this functionality via sand-boxed tabs:
           | https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
           | account...
        
       | barberpole wrote:
       | Vivaldi was a great musical genius.
        
       | mattowen_uk wrote:
       | > As Vivaldi Mail supports IMAP and POP3
       | 
       | And there was me hoping for Exchange-Sync support for Microsoft
       | 365 email integration, to release the local reliance on Outlook
       | 365 which gets worse with every revision :(
        
         | Maxburn wrote:
         | Ugh, me too! First thing I checked but no ability to add
         | exchange.
         | 
         | Unfortunately my org does not publish exchange as IMAP either.
        
         | globular-toast wrote:
         | I've been using Thunderbird at every Microsoft infested company
         | I've been at for approaching ten years now. It works fine for
         | email, address book and accepting invitations etc. The only
         | thing I have to use the (awful) web interface for is making
         | appointments, but I rarely have to do that. There may be a way
         | to make it work but I haven't bothered to look.
        
         | Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
         | Doesn't Microsoft 365 support POP3? My workplace uses that
         | horrid mess called Microsoft 365, Office 365 or whatever name
         | it has today, and its Outlook, but I can retrieve the emails
         | from GMail connecting via POP3. But I don't know if you're
         | looking for some more advanced functionality (not much of an
         | expert in email, I just did the first thing I found to be able
         | to process my email in a tolerable UI, it worked, so I moved on
         | to more productive things).
        
           | mattowen_uk wrote:
           | For Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Tasks type syncing, you really
           | need Exchange-Sync.
           | 
           | Once you've experienced all three working seamlessly on a
           | mobile phone against Exchange (Online or on-prem) you realise
           | how fragmented other 'Mail' sync systems are.
        
       | junon wrote:
       | I'm not seeing this exact question answered elsewhere, but since
       | Vivaldi is based on Chromium, does it have _any_ code that
       | randomly reaches out to remote servers (including but not limited
       | to Google) aside from, of course, those which are requested by
       | web page content?
        
         | rasz wrote:
         | Almost (1) all of it got removed or has option to disable,
         | altho not always clearly explained (2).
         | 
         | (1) it touches Vivaldi server on startup.
         | 
         | (2) "Google Service DNS to help resolve navigational errors"
         | equals https://medium.com/cloud-security/google-chrome-dns-
         | security...
        
           | junon wrote:
           | Thanks!
        
       | swiley wrote:
       | It's great there are alternative browsers but being closed source
       | and requiring a phone number is worse than Chrome.
        
         | eggman314 wrote:
         | Require a phone number?
        
           | merlinscholz wrote:
           | https://login.vivaldi.net/profile/id/signup
           | 
           | Last line on the page: "Before using Vivaldi Webmail and the
           | blogging platform, we'll ask you to verify your phone number.
           | That's it."
        
             | fpoling wrote:
             | It is otherwise impossible for a small company to provide
             | free email.
        
               | swiley wrote:
               | What you mean is free email that (supposedly) delivers to
               | hotmail? I could pass out email addresses to everyone on
               | my floor and it wouldn't cost me a dime.
        
       | tannhaeuser wrote:
       | AFAIK Vivaldi is Webkit/Blink based so it'd be interesting to
       | read a reflection on why the original Vivaldi code base was
       | abandoned, if its abandoning was regretted, and on the state of
       | the Web as a sustainable media format in general.
        
       | siproprio wrote:
       | I just can't stand the vivaldi UI. It's just too slow.
       | 
       | Especially everything tabs feels awful. From new tab, to drag-
       | and-drop.
        
         | rasz wrote:
         | Firefox:
         | https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_b4JWi49tKJUfE8oOvx...
         | 
         | Opera:
         | https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_Rn6fiEoSZpDpNfvzIj...
         | 
         | Vivaldi:
         | https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_1KXF2VcFzD3BIAFVIJ...
        
           | siproprio wrote:
           | Yep.
        
       | timwis wrote:
       | Doesn't backing a chromium-based browser like Vivaldi or Brave
       | push the industry further toward browser monopoly? (or at least
       | in the rendering engine sense, as we once had with IE)
        
       | 0x49d1 wrote:
       | Using Vivaldi as my main browser for several months now. There
       | are some problems with Google Docs, but other then that almost
       | everything is fine. I really like company's attitude to its
       | users, various researchers agree that they really don't leak what
       | they say they don't. Firefox is superb too, but mobile browser
       | experience is not there yet (I mean the new Android browser).
       | Brave is another option, but I feel that Vivaldi is way more
       | under my control and made "for me", even considering that Brave
       | is open sourced.
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-09 23:00 UTC)