Vivaldi 1.2 release | Hacker News Reader

Vivaldi 1.2 release

vivaldi.com

131 pointstimlyo126 comments

It feels like they're trying to serve two competing goals with this:

1) Be a faster, lighter, more customizable competitor to Chrome

2) Be a full "Internet suite" with browser and email client

I'm sure how well you can accomplish #1 while pouring resources into #2.

Moreover, I'm not sure how much of an audience there even is for #2. The minority who want a desktop email client are very vocal about it, but most of us haven't used an email fat client in years (save for perhaps Outlook when forced to at work).

I was a huge fan of Opera back in the day, and still use it as the primary browser on my phone. But even in its heyday, Opera's mail client was pretty weak compared to Thunderbird or other options. Bolting-on a "meh" email client to a web browser is like a digital wristwatch that prominently display the current YEAR on the main screen... a largely unnecessary feature that just takes up room.

I toyed around with an earlier release of Vivaldi, and thought it looked promising. But at this point I wouldn't even consider a browser that doesn't sync bookmarks and other data across my devices. In terms of prioritizing resources, I care about that 1,000x more than re-implementing Opera features from the late 90's that most people won't use.

They are kinda repeating the mistakes of Opera. I used Vivaldi for a few weeks and I really wanted to like it but it has (at least currently) to many quirks. For example not being able to delete addresses from the history which is given for every other browser. All I want is a Chrome with a nicer GUI.

Your example doesn't make a lot of sense. Opera can delete adresses from history. In fact, there are many things Opera does that other browsers can't.

But we are talking about Vivaldi!

I mean that they are focusing on the wrong things while having a really great potential.

Doing 1) AND 2) is perfectly possible. If you're writing it in a performant language. Opera has proven that by still being faster (qualifier: on windows and when excluding JS-heavy tasks) than either Chrome or Firefox. Just a simple thing as switching between tabs is immediately noticably faster in Opera than either of those, even when you have 100 diverse tabs open.

Vivaldi's problem is that they're building on top of chromium in all JS, which puts certain limits on just how efficient they can be performance-wise.

Additionally they're constrained in what they can implement by being tied to chromium, anything they can't do with chromium as it is, they'll have to implement changes in chromium and either live on a fork or try and push them upstream, both of which have high organizational costs.

Also, as a sidenote for the Opera email client: I'm curious how you think it was weaker than Thunderbird?

I've been using it for over a decade and technically i find it far superior, just with its ability to set up mutually inclusive folders that automatically sort email into themselves based on the same bayesian patterns that work for spam, and can be taught simply by dragging things in/out. Additionally, the comment about it "taking up room" is senseless, since it only uses any CPU/RAM if you actively enable it, and Opera's installer has always been tiny.

> faster, lighter, more customizable

Pick any two.

For a lot of years Opera had all 3. It was faster and used less resources than Firefox while it was more customizable out of the box (Firefox needed heavy duty plugins for parity or better).

The full Opera installer was something like 5MB for a full browser + email/RSS client + IRC client + torrent client.

Firefox's interface can be customized with CSS, without the need for a browser extension, so I'm not sure, how you could be more customizable than that...

Opera's mail client was awesome. It was much faster than Thunderbird or Outlook. Those would blow up with my inboxes of 500,000+ emails but Opera just chugged right along and worked without any problems.

It also synced IMAP from scratch way faster, too.

edit: The search was incredible as well

I really miss their old mail client. I guess they didn't target the enterprise email cloud and as a result couldn't fund it. It probably needed calendaring for that...

A month ago Vivaldi's CEO did a reddit AMA, with tons of questions and answers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ebgom/iama_jon_von_t...

> The biggest features we are working on are sync and mail

Okay, I have to question this. Why is a browser vendor spending precious time and money adding a mailbox to their browser?

I used Vivaldi a little bit ago during the beta/1.0 period for a few months—at that time at least, the UX needed more polish and there were bugs and usability issues that were daily pain points.

So I find this it concerning that they're building a mail client. They already have a browser and I already have a mail client. Why take developers off of working on the browser to provide me with a new mail client? It gives me the impression that this is fundamental to their strategy for building their browser UX—constant integration. What does this say about the future of Vivaldi development? I think I'd rather have a flexible UI that works for whatever I'm doing—NOT a bunch of integrations to various workflow points, some of which I really want and others I couldn't care for.

As if you did not already have the ability to put a mail client on your sidebar in Vivaldi. Using web panels, you can pin the email provider of your choice to an icon and open it in a sidebar at any point you like.

The first stage for them is rebuilding Opera 12.

They're still be missing the IRC and torrent clients :)

There are those of us who prefer having a well-integrated "Internet suite" (web browser, mail client), a la what Mozilla used to provide prior to the Firefox - Thunderbird split, or what Opera used to provide prior to being turned into a Chrome clone.

> As if you did not already have the ability to put a mail client on your sidebar in Vivaldi. Using web panels, you can pin the email provider of your choice to an icon and open it in a sidebar at any point you like.

I... uh, I'm not sure, or at least I hope that's not what they mean by building a mail client. Not having to use a shitty web-based interface is about 75% of why I'm using a mail client.

The whole browser is a "web-based interface". Vivaldi is built using HTML/JS.

Yes, but at least passing interface events doesn't require issuing a HTTP request to some server located halfway across the globe, and it gets at least some of the native metaphors right.

It still looks and feels like a square peg in a round hole (not to mention slower than a drunk tortoise), but it's a little better than a web page thing.

It's awesome that they implement an email client. (hopefully open source)

Opera Mail and Thunderbird were good free email clients, but now discontinued.

What options are there (PC)? Outlook, Windows 10 Mail, Windows Live Mail/Outlook Express, Thunderbird, IBM Notes, OSX Mail.

Ideally, I would like an email client that is as powerful as Outlook, has the UI of Google mail (especially the conversation view), has superb IMAP support, runs on my PC and stores all emails on disk. What's disappointing is that many email clients still have no conversation view (or a broken one like Outlook), just a "sent" and "inbox" folder, and this in 2016.

Thunderbird had a stable release 3 days ago and a preview 14 days ago. Development on it is still very much alive.

I like Postbox, which is a commercial fork of Thunderbird. Seems to hit most of your needs (not sure about the conversation view as I always turn off threads) and has some of the keyboard shortcuts of GMail. Definitely lets you store emails on disk / offline. Alas version 4 has been less stable than version 3 was.

(Not free, but $20 is pretty cheap.)

I currently use Postbox but heard that the company behind it was experiencing financial difficulties and a low user base (not sure how much of this is true).

Given that, I was going to wait until PB4 is no longer officially supported and make a full switch over to Thunderbird.

Genuine question but what does something like Postbox has (for regular users) over the vanilla Thunderbird + addons to justify $20 ?

It's been so long since I used Thunderbird that I'm not sure. I don't know if Thunderbird has things like the Focus Pane, where I can live-filter my Inbox down to just certain topics or certain senders. It feels a bit like OmniFocus or a GTD / Getting Things Done workflow:

http://www.softwarecrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/postb...

The killer app for me is the Postbox 4 feature to file a message in a folder just by pressing the V keyboard shortcut. Postbox then shows an Alfred/Spotlight-like "quick bar" with autocomplete - so just by typing "V GER" I can file an email in my "German Lessons" subfolder without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. They have a similar feature for automatically entering responses with a couple of keystrokes:

https://www.postbox-inc.com/blog/entry/postbox-4-quick-bar

(I also like that Postbox prompts if it detects the word "attached" and you forget to add the attachment, but I assume most email clients have that now.)

This can be done with addons in TB :

- Expression search addon to filter/search the inbox.

- Nostalgy addon for moving mail (and navigating the mailbox only with the keyboard). This addon is basically required for serious usage. Just press b and a popup shows up and allows you tochoose folder with autocomplete. It looks like this http://i.imgur.com/qYheafo.png

I took a look, and it does seem many of Postbox's features are renditions of Thunderbird addons, just with a slicker UI. Nostalgy has clearly been a big influence, and possibly Expression (though both are inspired by Gmail). I haven't found an addon for the focus sidebar, but I bet that's out there too.

My only issue is that during the years I used Thunderbird (pre Postbox) & exploring the addons, I never even knew about Nostalgy or Expression. For me, it's worth $20 for someone to design a pre-loaded Thunderbird with the best addons & make it part of the default UI & support docs. I would have easily taken $20+ of billable time just to discover & decide between the TB QuickMove and Quick Folder Move addons.

[But I'm really glad Thunderbird can do this, now I can recommend Nostalgy & TB to folks who don't want to pay for an email program.]

Postbox looks like a fully-featured fork and I'd be glad to support their awesome work with dollars, but sadly there's no Linux build: https://www.postbox-inc.com/download

there is a lot of mail client, tbh, you just not know them. Mailbird is a popular example you've skipped.

for my desires - all of them sucks anyway, not providing basic features that are needed and bloating the client with thing almost-nobody-need

Another is The Bat!. I've personally been using this email client for PC for 10 years now. https://www.ritlabs.com/en/

It has extremely powerful filtering, multiple inboxes for all my accounts (I prefer to deal with them separately rather than the unified inbox trend), IMAP and recently redone outlook.com/Exchange pipeline, can encrypt local store, and it's very customizable (can have it do threading/conversation for example). Reminds me of the old Opera in this regard.

The UI is a bit dated imo as it has stayed true to it's same look the whole time I've used it and skipping the modern trend of Outlook-like email client looks, but this to me is part of it's appeal. Once you get used to it.

That's pretty much the tagline of mutt[0].

> All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.

I've become really fond of notmuch[1]. It's basically a mail database and library with really fast search, tags, and native support for threads. Numerous front-ends exists[2]; I use the bundled emacs client, but have wanted to try out nevermore[3] (it did not work well with Evil last I checked).

0: http://www.mutt.org/

1: https://notmuchmail.org/

2: https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/

3: https://github.com/tjim/nevermore

eMClient. Convo mode comes in future version now in beta though, but it can do ActiveSync and *DAV.

How about Mutt? It's undeniably very powerful, and with its support for threading it's probably not that different from Gmail's "conversation view", with the added bonus that it won't read your emails and serve you adverts based on them!

Nylas N1. Open source and runs on any platform.

Given that you use/run a sync node.

Claws did me well on Mint. Lightweight. Worked well except with Gmail's tags. There was workaround but I just skipped it since web interface is fast on Gmail. Did you not know about Claws or have a specific reason for not mentioning it?

There are a few:

* Canary: http://canarymail.io (in beta)

* Airmail: http://airmailapp.com

* Polymail: https://polymail.io (in beta and currently Google-only, ironically, given its name)

* CloudMagic: https://cloudmagic.com

* Postbox: https://www.postbox-inc.com

Why would Vivaldi's email client be open source when the browser isn't even?

It is not free but eM Client[0] offers a "light" version of Outlook's UI and it has the best CalDAV/CardDAV support on Windows compared to Thunderbird + Lightning or 3rd party Outlook plugins.

Currently Version 7 is still in Beta but it is stable enough to be my daily driver and it offers some important features like a message thread view, which is still missing on their current, stable 6.0 release.

[0] http://www.emclient.com/?lang=en

Simple: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

Mail sounds like a dream compared to each app integrating a messaging silo nowadays.

> Okay, I have to question this. Why is a browser vendor spending precious time and money adding a mailbox to their browser?

Because Jon von Tetzchner (founder of Opera and Vivaldi) thinks having it in the browser is superior to having it as a separate app. It used to be like this in Opera as well. His goal is to provide an application with more value than just the stripped down browsers you see these days.

this really is the reason. He wants to remake Opera and is pretty clear about that. I never used Opera's email client so I don't really care but I know there are a lot of people who do.

>stripped down browsers you see these days.

You mean, "browsers".

I love Opera Mail but now that Opera is in Chinese hands I don't feel comfortable using it anymore. If Vivaldi does the mailer right, I will welcome it with open hands.

> Why is a browser vendor spending precious time and money adding a mailbox to their browser?

Quite simple: They want to have an email client with features that are currently not offered by any other email client.

I may of course be ignorant, but beyond being integrated within the browser, can you tell me of an email client that uses mutually inclusive folders that automatically sort email into themselves based on the same bayesian patterns that work for spam, and can be taught simply by dragging things in/out?

> Why is a browser vendor spending precious time and money adding a mailbox to their browser?

Because the folks at Slack haven't put a browser into their chat client yet?

I like that he mentioned VRML. Most people have forgotten about that tech which was supposed to be the next, big thing. I remember doing chat rooms made in it (similar to There game) and creating a few sites for emerging "VWWW." Fun stuff. Can't find original now.

> One of the things that makes Vivaldi unique is that it is built on modern web technologies.

If a company is making this stupid statement on the first page I can imagine the rest.

It's not stupid, it's true - a lot of the UI is written in HTML/CSS/Javascript.

What he calls out as stupid was the mistake of using those technologies for the UI.

Although I defended Vivaldi as the Opera Successor since its Beta, I stopped to support and suggest it because it failed to fix the js/css/HTML sluggishness with Version 1, and even more sadly with Version 1.2. I started using unofficial stable Chromium Builds with Codecs and Sync disabled via ChrLauncher and couldn't be happier.

Try Otter too, it's promising as an Opera successor, although it's still lacking some stuff like password manager.

What do you expect from a non native UI which is rendered by the Chromium extensions system? It only can be as fast as the used System is.

So, Vivaldi is nothing at all for people who value speed more than functions. But for people who value functions over speed, i can see that these could be drawn to it.

Like Atom? So it is not unique. We can say this statement for a lot of software products being Chromium more special and from a third party.

Also like Firefox, XUL is XML + CSS + JS. And that's what, close to 20 years old now?

Is Atom a web browser? :)

I'm pretty sure that they mean Vivaldi is unique as a browser built entirely using modern web technologies.

PS: I'm not saying they're right, I haven't researched to find out if there are other HTML/JS based browsers (aka with browser chrome built in HTML/JS).

Unique?

What a joke.

It just loads other websites inside an iframe. That's how all similar web-based apps and web-OSs work. Eg there is also servo with its HTML based UI; there is WebOS with its browser, ChromeOS with its browser; FirefoxOS; etc - totally non unique beside it has a nice UI inspired by the old Opera 6-12 UI.

Vivaldi features are not that bad, but the fact that this "browser" is only a combination of some extensions bundled with Chromium is a big downside.

Also, not being able to implement more privacy for example fingerprint block is also rather bad. All they do is work inside their extensions related code with avoiding to touch actual Chromium code base.

When these guys have finally more knowledge about Chromium to either enhance it or remove unused parts - Vivaldi UI exists outside of Chromium and they carry all that Chromium luggage around which they also not using at all which means tons of dead weight - then this browser COULD be useful - of course only when Open Sourcing it 100% - but before, not even worth thinking about it.

Also the whole fact that their internet is JS/Electron. This really puts a damper on the performance their UI will be able to achieve.

The browser is fast, based on Chromium, has a nice Opera 12 inspired UI but is closed source.

Similarly to Opera, the startup time (even hot) is far behind Chrome. This is a deal breaker.

it was way better several builds ago

Your browser stays open for 99% of the day, I don't see why a slow startup would be a deal breaker.

No, my browser gets closed/opened a lot during the day.

Why?

Different people use browsers differently? We're humans after all.

I never understood people whining about memory usage and having 120 tabs opened - - having so many tabs sounded silly - - now I'm one of those people. I just happened to start using my browser that way.

Different people, different needs.

Yes, I still have Opera 12 with a lot of tabs and tab groups. Sadly, old Opera's tab grouping is not replicated in any other browser I've tried.

Like any other program - I use it when I need.

it's open source. you cannot use the code or contribute, but still you can download the source code https://vivaldi.com/source/

> it's open source. you cannot use the code

Umm... that's "visible source", not "open source".

I'm not sure if it needs to be open source to accomplish their goals (Opera isn't). But much of the tech crowd they're trying to reach won't use proprietary software. Come to think of it, I can't really tell what their business model is supposed to be.

The business model is the same as every other browser: monetized search, plus a small number of paid-for bookmarks.

However, Vivaldi is a small operation so it doesn't need many users.

Also, it's self-financed so there are no outside investors and the founder can do whatever he wants.

> much of the tech crowd they're trying to reach won't use proprietary software

You do realize that Chrome is proprietary, as are Safari and IE/Edge? No tech users at all?

Gmail is also proprietary....

> You do realize that Chrome is proprietary

Chrome is a build of the (completely open-source) Chromium browser, with some additional media codecs and a different logo slapped on it.

You seem to ignore the binary blob extensions e.g. http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/not-ok-google-chromi...

Also chrome integrates with service that Are closed source. Eg forsync

Chrome is more proprietary than Vivaldi, and both based on the same open-source Chromium.

The main difference is that you can read the Vivaldi source code (even though it's not open source) whereas you really have no way of knowing what Google puts into its proprietary Chrome browser.

So, the techie audience that prefers open source should logically prefer Vivaldi to Chrome.

You can install and use Chromium instead of Chrome, which is how I'm replying to your comment.

Yes indeed. Chromium is open source, and Chrome isn't. Which is where I came in ;-)

This isn't actually the source. You can't build Vivaldi from this. It's just their Chromium patches.

the browser is RATHER fast, but ui is single threaded, one tab can freeze the whole ui. also try to press and keep ctrl+t - it will froze, try this with other browsers - they are fine

in the reddit AMA linked elsewhere in the comments they were asked about it and said they were thinking about it so it isn't entirely out of the question that they will open source it.

Yesterday's post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11820795

I wonder why basically all new browser projects use Webkit / Blink, and none use Gecko)? This only strenghtens Google's position regarding the implementation of web standards. Recently Microsoft open sourced Chakra, their JS Engine, and there's to hope that it can compete with V8 to prevent the same for JavaScript.

Because Gecko is a performance disaster so bad that Mozilla had to invent a new programming language just to create a replacement.

Because embedding Gecko is markedly more difficult than embedding Blink / WebKit, and now that we’re heading towards a WebKit / Blink monoculture there’s no incentive to choose against that.

Interestingly, Servo is basing itself on Chromium’s embedding framework, so that should hopefully be a valid choice when it reaches maturity.

> Interestingly, Servo is basing itself on Chromium’s embedding framework, so that should hopefully be a valid choice when it reaches maturity.

Rust introduces several new toolchain requirements, though.

? When you use CEF, you're not building Chromium so I don't understand why Servo's compilation toolchain would affect an application that just wants to embed. Libraries written in Rust can be easily called from C code.

Do you plan to release vivaldi opensource or not?

From the AMA on reddit

> We have the C++ code as open source now. As far as making the rest of Vivaldi open source, we're still discussing the implications and want to make the best possible decision.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ebgom/iama_jon_von_t...

I think it's mostly the C++ code that was already open source (Chromium etc.).

> We use JavaScript and React to create the user interface with the help of Node.js and a long list of NPM modules.

Does this make any difference to the user?

They are aiming to please power-users, some of which might be pleased to know which stack is used.

In that case they failed horribly, knowing what a security nightmare NPM modules are and having that embedded in my browser is 110% turning me off from ever wanting to install Vivaldi on anything that's not securely sandboxed away from the world at large.

Yea, its alot quicker to develop and experiment with new features.

I must admit, I do like the thought of `theme-color` support being integrated into desktop browsers. It works really well on mobile. I know it's a more complex task on the desktop where there are a multitude of browser customisiations and themes to take into consideration, but this looks like a good attempt.

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ui...

A closed-source browser that's built on Chromium. In 2016. Why.

I see the source here:

https://vivaldi.com/source/

That's only the partly LGPL Chromium code.

From https://vivaldi.net/userblogs/entry/a-few-words-about-open-s...

> Our source code package is available here: vivaldi.com/source. This links to a copy of the Chromium source code with the changes we made to allow our HTML/CSS/JS UI to run.

> All our changes to Chromium source code are under a BSD license and hence can read by anyone. The details are explained in the the README and LICENSE files, within that package.

> In addition, all of our UI code (included in normal packages) is written in plain, readable text. This means that all parts of Vivaldi are full audit-able and open from that perspective.

There is a lot of security considerations to make a browser. JavaScript based technologies are not well known for their security.

In practice any kind of technology is only as good as its developers.

And I doubt that the security record of "Javascript based technologies" is better or worse than the security record of "C/C++ based technologies", for that matter.

As a purely theoretical point, "Javascript based technologies" have the advantage of automatic memory management, which, again, theoretically, removes an attack vector almost entirely.

Getting back on track, a browser is engine + UI. Vivaldi uses Chromium as the engine. HTML/JS are used just for the UI.

I am waiting for the Rust-based Firefox :}

Firefox 45, the current release, has a tiny bit on Linux and OS X. In a few releases, it will be on Windows as well.

I don't know what percentage you need to have it be "based", but we're getting there...

I've been on Vivaldi from the beta days, and am glad to see it's been steadily improving.

On my Mac, it's extremely responsive, probably as good as Safari. It feels snappier than chrome or (god forbid) firefox. Page load speeds feel quicker than other browsers. It's as stable as anything else I've used. The chrome extensions I use all work well.

All in all, a very positive experience. I just switched to Vivaldi as my main browser after using v1.2 for a couple of days now.

I only wish they bring some of the old opera features like text reflow, user CSS for page rendering, etc.

After using it for 10 minutes

- Chrome plugins

- tabs configurable at the side instead of on top

- native (?) mousegestures

So far so good!

Try tab tiling: ctrl-select two (or more) tabs and select "Tile tabs" from their context menu.

I remember seeing the mouse gestures in Opera and wanting the same feature in my Firefox. I used this in Firefox with an extension for several years and later did the same with Chrome. Now with Vivaldi I accidentally performed a mouse gesture due to muscle memory and to my surprise it worked out of the box.

With the same people behind it this browser seems to be the real successor for Opera. :)

I was excited about Vivaldi until I had to get on IRC to ask how to pull tabs out of and back into a window. I've been loving Opera lately.

Funny that I've just deleted Opera a few weeks ago and possibly will not install it again. Since they've sold their company

OMG yet another desktop application in javascript.

What's so wrong about that? All the heavy browser lifting is done by the browser engine, which is native, and everything else is just... chrome. Which doesn't really have huge performance requirements.

UI is very latency sensitive, even a couple of frames of delay can be detrimental to the feel of a UI.

Comparing the delay of the UI with many tabs (30+) Vivaldi wins easily over Firefox and Chrome.

I did not say Vivaldi was slow, just that performance is relevant in UI. I'll give Vivaldi a try.

I really like the browser, but still doesn't work with Apple Keychain so using it is not an option here. Guess I'm too lazy but it would take weeks to migrate over, and then I'd need to store the passwords in dual locations, which seems like a bad idea.

What is the experience on laptops? I tried Vivaldi 1.0 or 1.1 and it drained the battery like nothing I have seen before as far as browsers go. Not sure if that is a Chromium or Vivaldi issue.

I haven't yet seen any benchmarks for Vivaldi, but yeah, Chrome/-ium is known for criminally eating through battery life.

Recently Vivaldi have started to hang after opening the lock screen in Fedora (23), you have to wait for the Force Quit Window to restart it.

Otherwise, excellent browser.

They should make their browser more native to os in look

they dont want to. but you can enable native window decorator from your os. theming (for icons) will be available some day in the future

How is the memory & cpu usage compared to GChrome? Especially if you have 20+ tabs open

Can you use chrome plugins for vivaldi?

You can use chrome plugins/the chrome webstore and the devs have actually pushed bug fixes that address compatibility with prominent plugins, i.e. Chromecast and LastPass

Where can I find the source for the project?

This isn't an open source project

this is open source.

https://vivaldi.com/source/

Is it easy to get a reproducible build? Has anyone tried?

That is visible source. Without a license, it's not "open source".

Nor is the source provided there complete. The last time they were asked, they said only the C++ code is open and available to the public.

It's the LGPL parts of Chromium that they needed to modify to run their engine. So it's LGPL'd, but only the specific parts that they need to release.

Right. They're waving that around like they're saying the stuff is open source, and it's very much not open source. Building a bunch of stuff on top of an open source project and then claiming your source is open because some base amount of the source forced them under its license to be open is a total cop-out. No, Vivaldi is not open source, and no they do not have plans to ever open source Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is my new browser of choice.

But does it have waitblock?

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