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Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

I could've given it a try if it was opensource. But because it's closed I immediately classify it as vaporware, and as the browser is one of the two centers of my daily computing (the other being emacs), I won't invest in vaporware. I believe that opensourcing is the best choice of the company behind this.

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You are using the word vaporware in a very odd way. Vaporware is stuff that won't actually come into existence. Vivaldi has already been publically available for nearly a year.

Sorry, yes, I intended "software that'll become useless, unmaintained and outdated rather quickly".

Abandonware.

That's pre-abandonware

I.e. "software".

<snark>If I had a penny for every useless, unmaintained, and outdated open source project...</snark>

...you'd have more pennies than me if I had a penny for every unmaintained commercial software.

Whoops, meant to say "fewer" but now I can't edit. I just negated my point.

The great thing about useless, unmaintened, and outdated open source projects, is that anyone can pick it up, and turn it into a useful, maintained and updated project.

If it was a closed source project you'd have to start from scratch every time if you wanted to restart the project.

This is quite a bold statement to make. Instead of anyone you should have said someone, particularly someone with a large amount of money, free time and will, in other words very few people. Depending on the size and complexity of the project it could be too much for a single someone to attempt.

It is not unheard of that someone tried and abandoned but would probably have achieved their goal by starting from scratch rather that attempting to revive an outdated unmaintained project.

The source is available at https://vivaldi.com/source/?lang=en_US

What about the licence? There are five-six xz'ed tarballs there, each ~600 MBs.

1. This End User License Agreement ("EULA") governs your use ("You") of the browser software in executable form ("Software") and any ancillary services ("Services") provided to You by Vivaldi Technology AS ("Vivaldi") to the exclusion of all other terms and conditions. Source code used in the Software, under open source license agreements, can be obtained at https://vivaldi.com/source.

That is not the source, that's just their chromium patches.

Why is everyone so confused about this, is it really so difficult to read the about of vivaldi or the first paragraph of the EULA ?

I've read their site and I can't figure out what they're selling me, what's the business model here?

Edit: Never mind, homepage ads I see. Eh easy enough to close them out..

> Closed source = vaporware

Then why has Firefox been the 'shit' browser for the better part of a decade now?

Best battery life (usually by a 2-4h difference!) -> use Edge/Safari

Best stability -> use Chrome

Best performance -> use Blink-based browser

Most extensions -> use Firefox (Chrome has 90% of the FF extensions available though)

Hell, Firefox still doesn't have e10s fully working, so one tab takes down the entire browser. Slow sites lock up the UI. Scrolling sometimes still isn't smooth. Plus, Firefox is ugly, especially on mobile. and whilst its admirable they still prop up Gecko, its a substandard rendering engine compared to Webkit, Blink or Trident/EdgeHMTL.

Low memory usage is a Firefox win at least, partially because they don't have true multi process yet.

I would gladly switch to Firefox on my dev machine (opening both Photoshop, Visual Studio and Chrome in a 8GB RAM system is a recipe to disaster), if their development tools didn't suck.

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

Given your interest in rendering engines, you may be interested in the work being done by Mozilla folks on Servo: https://servo.org/

You want to give domination of the internet to one giant tax evading transnational advertising company -> use chrome / blink based browser.

Sorry but not everyone thinks in short term personal interest, some prefer to see the internet and web as a collective good that has to be preserved with a long term vision.

I have a lot of criticism of mozilla and firefox but I would not ever advise anyone to use a GAFM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft) product or service.

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