Vivaldi 2.6 | Hacker News Reader

Vivaldi 2.6

vivaldi.com

51 pointsjonmccull46 comments

This monetization of web content first as a business model for browsers is pathetic when considering what are the stakes. I will pay for Firefox premium (VPN and cloud) and will always block ads no matter what. I’m not interested in content that’s only published to generate revenue. Vivaldi or Brave whom ever... I don’t need a to streamline online advertisement, I want it to die together with the industry that’s based on it.

Exactly, why are we so ok with businesses trying to manipulate us into buying things that we don't ask for? I mean I understand that a business needs to make money, but that shouldn't excuse you for doing this manipulation. You can't excuse unethical behavior just "because I needed to make money". And if it was only about buying things, but this whole industry has become a mass manipulation machine for politicians with bad intententions.

I wish Mozilla would offer a DNS level content blocker (pihole, NextDns..) with lists curated by the public/volunteers (Sleeping Giants...?). Could be set as default in Firefox, but can be used by anyone, for free.

I think it could undermine the monetary incentive social media drives out of hate speech and fake news, while users can still use these platforms (and sites in general) for their intended purpose.

I completely agree with you. I block ads on principle and will do so even if they're unobtrusive and backed by blockchain-based profit sharing. Judging by this being the top comment, many HN-ers agree with you as well.

The Internet population at large, however, doesn't. People would rather watch ads than pay and until it changes there will be many businesses online relying on ads.

i want neither ads or paying. i'd like to see everyone with their own website. peer-to-peer can handle a lot like video, as well as a decentralized news feed, and a new type of web-ring, adding each other's websites instead of adding fb friends. it's easy to set up free hosting for someone's website, and to supply a free domain, even if a subdomain off another person's site. there are ways.

I prefer Browser and VPN from different providers. Opera has a free built in VPN by the way.

" and will always block ads no matter what."

I don't mind smaller ads. Metafiler for example. But most websites are unusable without an adblocker.

Strangely I remember that when printed Newspapers were still big, the advertisement was one of the valuable parts of them.

Seems that you're angry, although I mostly am in the same camp, I can't forget that advertising is as old as societies. Paid magazines had ads in them. The web ... and monetization is an issue. It's as if before the market was balanced around a little more and regular investment from customers, yielding a better environment for companies to work. On the web you're running after cents everywhere.. Nobody's happy. It's more suited to passion driven websites ..

Agreed. The web would be much, much smaller if we all blocked ads, but the quality of the content would likely be much higher. I'm in favour of that. Occasionally I stumble upon a website full of information written by a passionate individual - these are the best. Example from my bookmarks: http://vwlowen.co.uk/index.htm (I included the index to show the ".htm" bit - now there's a blast from the past!).

It would certainly be more exclusive. Though based on the things I see some friends spending on, I'm not convinced that's better. ('Essential' oils, homeopathy, heavily processed foods, luxuries that bankrupt them, etc.)

I didn't mind image based ads with a clickable url.... that was ok...

what was never ok was the javascrap that is loaded along the advertisement image.... this is where all the creepy tracking and privacy invasion takes place.. . browser vendors have been absolutely fucking shit at providing end users with finer controls over what inside JavaScrap is allowed to be run...there have been addons over the years that have provided more finer grain control, and even the various ad blockers.

It's an social issue now because the industry that has grown around this constant tracking and surveillance doesn't give a fuck, infact they're practically funded by globalist scum to keep doing it. Goolagdo all evil mantra, being the worst offenders as they have always had the agenda of data collecting everything. With the likes of MSuck/Faceb0rg/twatter etc and even Moztard corp, all just pushing this insanity along. Never mind all the chum 'partners' involved.

What does Vivaldi do that you don't like? They have a new "abusive ads" filter, but other than that I'm not aware they do anything, and you can run uBlock origin from the Chrome store just fine.

1. proprietary

2. focused on features, not privacy

amen. ads are pollution that are hazardous to your health.

I really love Vivaldi's features and how they're designed/UX'ed.

But I've had to move away from it, back to Firefox, because it was simply too sluggish and weird right where it matters.

Like, I'm never entirely sure whether a page is loading. Is my connection bad, or is Vivaldi in a weird lockup state? I mean, the latter is totally imaginable. I've had pages suddenly render entirely white, while stuff is still clickable (i.e. the mouse becomes a hand icon when I move over where I expected to see buttons). I had to copy the url into a new tab and all was good again.

Quirks like these compared with the slight slowness of the UI make Vivaldi feel like a pre-iphone smartphone. I wish they would address this.

I don't even think I'd need for the UI to be much faster - I'm ok with a slightly less snappy UI in exchange for all the power user features (and the speed with which Vivaldi has been adding them). But you have to improve the visual feedback. Little loading spinners can get you a long way. Don't just freeze stuff. When I click "stop", make the stop button become the reload button immediately again. Show proper error pages when stuff goes wrong, I don't mind, I can reload. Ditch the limbo states.

I truly wonder whether the Vivaldi team actually uses Vivaldi. Or maybe they all use enormously powerful 32 core workstations on amazing internet? C'mon guys, fix your browser. It's worth it.

For me it's one of the snappiest (on Linux mint / i7 / 16GB). I changed to Vivaldi about year ago and it's the first browser ever which isn't constantly slowing down with time and I'm not constantly thinking should I change again.

Hm! Maybe it's all Windows specific then. That's a pretty polar opposite experience you got there.

dunno where you get that, for me Vivaldi is better than chrome and firefox, along with providing decent ux (ie addons firefox used to have)

fireefox is complete garbage now, its not any faster and the ux is absolute shit, and no more decent addons to fix it.

and I use vivaldi at work on a piddly 2core 2.4ghz laptop..so wtf are you running vivaldi on to be saying its sluggish.. total bs

On Windows the new tab experience feels very sluggish for me, although I don't use Vivaldi as my main browser so can't comment on the rest. Chrome, by comparison, feels completely smooth and instant. Firefox is a touch slow compared to Chrome but noticeably better than Vivaldi. It's such a small thing but trying to move away from Chrome it was the first thing I noticed and it still irks me.

On the topic of browsers, netsurf[0] (which implements its own engine, rather than being yet another webkit/chrome/gecko frontend) is close[1] to making a new release.

[0] http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

[1] https://listmaster.pepperfish.net/pipermail/netsurf-dev-nets...

"Small as a mouse, fast as a cheetah and available for free."

Looks interesting for sure. But I would miss a lot of privacy plug ins.

i prefer this to WebPositive in Haiku (edit for haiku)

Look I'm not asking for the most modern bloated web design, I like simplicity, but that website looks pretty outdated an ugly for a modern web browser. As a user if their website looks that outdated why should I trust their browser?

While understandable, that's just one opinion.

I actually do like the classic design, and how the page doesn't require downloading several megabytes of data to display.

So, basically, it will pass more of your data to Google, not block tracking, but remove a lot of the visual noise that reminds you you're being tracked...all while raising the stakes for advertisers to circumvent current and largely effective ad blocking methods.

>So, basically, it will pass more of your data to Google

Where exactly do you get this from?

The title is mildly confusing right now, I parsed it as "Abusive (Ad Blocker)" instead of "(Abusive ad) blocker" and wondered why they would want to boast that on their blog

I run uBlock Origin in hard mode[1]. It’s pretty close to an “Abusive (Ad Blocker)”, and I like it. Most websites break on first visit, which makes me more aware of all the extraneous crap.

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-m...

I switched from Chrome to Vivaldi and back to FF for two reasons:

1) Vivaldi rendering performance is the worst I've ever seen in a browser. No idea how they managed that using webkit, but some sites would make tabs crash on a high end system.

2) The web developer tools are unusable due to bugs.

3) Fixing simple but impactful bugs takes too long.

I really like their useful and plenty settings for everything, but 1) and 2) make it a no go for me.

Vivaldi using Webkit... Its Chromium isnt it?

They're using Webkit, yes, but I guess it's highly customized. The performance is so much worse than Chrome and FF

It's even possible to create pages in a way that reproducibly freezes and crashes Vivaldi. Their rendering process handles pages with many elements and multimedia objects very poorly.

Vivaldi uses Blink.[1]

[1] https://help.vivaldi.com/article/user-agent-spoofing/

>Vivaldi rendering performance is the worst I've ever seen in a browser. No idea how they managed that using webkit, but some sites would make tabs crash on a high end system.

That's what happens when you build your UI using HTML, CSS and node.js.

Oh, I first thought they added an ad blocker that is abusive.

The "abusive ads" text links to Google's guidelines for abusive ads: is this what Vivaldi is using to determine what's "abusive"?

> We’ve got great feedback on our support for User Profiles and based on that we’ve added new ways to customise those for you.

Are user profiles the same kind of dumb shit that is in Chrome? As in, it's completely forced upon you even on a single-user machine with every way to disable it removed years ago.

Yeah, what's the deal with that? There have to be at least 2 nines in the percentage of end-user systems used by only a single person. The only explanation I can think of is that they're angling for a Chrome-like cross-device experience that conveniently stores all of your browsing data on their servers.

I'm seriously thinking of switching to Vivaldi as my default development browser.

It has incredible keyboard support and feature wise closest to the old Opera browser, which till date is the first browser I feel in love with

Bit of a letdown really, I've been waiting since forever for an Android browser and now they come up with this "selected ads" thing.. I don't think they are serious.

> [Tabs] Releasing middle mouse button on a tab closes it, even when the actual click was somewhere else VB-43962

I filed this bug two years ago. I guess there are fewer and fewer mouse-users.

How much of a payoff is there in browser business given that browser development is not trivial at all and it has become a commodity?

Browser development can't both be non trivial and a commodity. Or I'm misunderstanding you.

It can. Lot of commodities today is highly non-trivial.

Browser development is non-trivial, but browsers themselves are a commodity. There is no money in browser itself as an app, or at the very least not enough to support development.

Nowadays, browser development means rebasing your changes on top of Chromium periodically.

But how do you make money to pay your devs?

Thw only credible statement I found regarding that was that they sell the spots on the default start page for money. However, I have no idea how much these are worth in a browser with approximately 0 percemt marketshare.

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