Vivaldi Browser Introduces Vivaldi Mail, Calendar and RSS Technical Previews | Hacker News Reader

Vivaldi Browser Introduces Vivaldi Mail, Calendar and RSS Technical Previews

vivaldi.com

42 pointsMisutaRoboto6 comments

I'd switch to Vivaldi instantly if they dumped Chromium / Blink and the browser didn't contact Google every time it starts.

Mozilla's short-term vision in not offering an easy to use standalone Gecko rendering engine (to prevent others from making competing browsers using Gecko) is a major factor on why Chrome and Chromium browsers rules the roost today. And Firefox keeps losing its market share. It's a good example of greed corrupting open source philosophy. (They seem to have shortsightedly realised this for mobile platforms with GeckoView).

In choosing Chromium / Blink Vivaldi has chosen to sacrifice all the philosophy of the old Opera browser - creating an innovative, blazing fast browser without being a resource hog.

We need more Webkit and Gecko based browsers.

Great to see a browser integrating feed reader at a time when popular websites are removing support for RSS/Atom feeds. Hope others will follow suit.

Agree. I like feed reader over Social Media style feed a lot.

Decentralized, Read individual feeds separately or grouped together.

I use The Old Reader since I don't want to be stuck with one browser.

It's great to have mail and calendar alternatives.

But vivaldi's user interface feels very slow and much slower and heavier than all the other browsers. I tried multiple times. I just can't get used to it.

For reference to what slow user interface means I did some comparisons to Chrome and best case scenario (cloning super light 404 pages) Opening tabs is ~5-20x slower, while closing tabs is over 1000x slower. Closing tabs is so slow you can actually see them closing one at a time (after selecting close all tabs). Vivaldi UI is written in javascript (react) and runs as blocking single thread - Firing slow operation like closing a tab means UI freezes and stops accepting new commands for up to one second. Going fullscreen on Youtube can also take over one second.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCA2qIIG1M

>going full-screen on YT: over 1 second

>returning from full-screen on YT: over 1.2 seconds

>opening Tab: 700 millisecond, 1.75 seconds, 3.453 seconds, 6.078 seconds, 7.734 seconds

>opening Tab totals: 0.700-7.7 seconds

>closing Tab: 1.468 seconds, 2.407 seconds, infinity because browser lost the Click event, 968 millisecond, 1.390 seconds, infinity, 700 millisecond

>closing Tab totals: 0.7-2.4 seconds or infinity if you aren't lucky

>time you have to wait after opening few tabs in background for the page to regaining usability: 11 seconds!

All of that on 4GHz Haswell.

Vivaldi is Gmail levels slow, new Youtube levels slow. Remember kids, dont do UI in javascript.

I love the web panel feature they offer, wish you could run extensions on them though

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