How Vivaldi browser is different from Google Chrome
vivaldi.com
vivaldi.com
I was a big fan of Opera, so I decided to try Vivaldi, which has built-in features for this.
After a few months I'm probably switching back again due to two problems:
- Vivaldi runs a lot of stuff on the main UI thread, leading to unresponsive interfaces (try the History Panel with a large history, it takes several seconds to type each character in the search bar, and just having the panel open slows down every other tab).
- The Android browser doesn't support extensions, and the ad-blocking is not as good as Firefox Mobile + uBlock Origin.
If not for those two problems, I would keep it. It's a great browser and I admire its passion for its own power users.
- Vivaldi Android has its own ad-blocking system. IIRC, it can load external lists. Though it has less features than uBlock Origin, it's enough for me.
I prefer the desktop Vivaldi to other web browsers because of its features:
- Vertical tab list
- Mouse gestures (click-right-left to go back, down-up to duplicate a tab...)
- Sane download manager (compared to Firefox)
- The features above are native. No need for shady extensions (or clean extension that could become shady on a future upgrade).
- More customization than most browsers (not counting the undocumented config of FF)
Your list of features is the same reason why I started using Vivaldi. I have a lot of respect for the team, and I'm glad to be using a tool that explicitly caters to power users too.
With Mozilla's recent comments in support of censorship and de-platforming, I just started giving Brave browser a try, since they appear to be more focused on privacy and freedom of speech rather than making divisive political statements.
I have several browsers installed on my Galaxy S7: Firefox, Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo, Naked Browser, and Chrome. Out of all these, Firefox is the worst performing and nearly unusable it's so slow and causes overall system slowness. Vivaldi and Naked Browser are the quickest and least resource intensive. Chrome is a few steps better than FireFox with DuckDuckGo somewhere in the middle. 90% of the time I used DuckDuckGo for general browsing though due its privacy tools.
That's not true. Servo is new, which is where Mozilla are picking their changes to Gecko/Quantum from. These false blanket statements aren't convincing me to use Vivaldi at all. Sure it has it's fair share of issues, but it "works" to a degree and maybe it'll chug along enough to finally be used by 2022.
Currently I'm using Ungoogled Chromium [1] on Windows and Bromite [2] on Android, but the latter will eventually be replaced with the former when I end up building Ungoogled Chromium TriChrome (it's a build mechanism for Android 10 and above to have a shared library package, as well as a WebView and browser package separately for Android).
Ungoogled Chromium is great because it accomplishes all that Vivaldi does, except syncing, all the while keeping the nice UI of Chrome. I'm not a fan of syncing, so that doesn't matter to me.
I used to use Firefox on desktop (prior to and after the Quantum update) but WebGPU was just way to slow for me and I switched to a Chromium-based application.
[1] - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
[2] - https://www.bromite.org
Their blog posts are an interesting read too.
Honest question. I am thinking of switching browsers and nothing looks appealing.
You can donate to the project here: https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo
Wish them all the best but i'm not holding my breath it will be PROD ready anytime soon. The bar to entry in the browser space is simply too high now....
As far as I recall, Ungoogled also doesn't offer automatic updates, probably for the same reason.
I also dislike the fact that it's actually a fork that adds features that have nothing to do with "ungoogling". But that's a minor point.
I want the vendor services/additions to be plugins instead of forks.
I am a fan of Firefox and servo, but this is a little under selling vivaldi. Vivaldi's goal isn't to be a stripped down chrome with better security, it is geared for power users. Some might say "bloated", and others might say "featureful and freakishly customizable".
Those sound like the same ends on the same spectrum
But I just feel happier having certain things always open in their own container, and not sharing cookies or anything with other ones - all my news sites are in one, banking in another etc
I know they've said it's hard to do, and I don't doubt them, but until someone else implements containers I can't/won't move.
It is a real pity, containers are awesome, one of the best new features in a browser for some time, but damn firefox is frustratingly slow.
My experience with Firefox got much faster after I installed a local DNSMasq server.
Things got noticeably faster after that point.
For details, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21877330
This comment was when I first installed DNSMasq on a very low powered OrangePi Zero (512MB) on home network. I worked a lot of kinks and this situation holds truer when compared to that time.
The aim here is to minimize the DNS query turnaround time and reduce the latencies while opening a connection.
When the network is working smoother, Firefox's performance goes up in a disproportional fashion. I didn't notice the same amount of improvement in other network bound stuff but, Firefox went from "meh" to "youjustdidwhat!?" after DNSMasq installation and modem change.
Same thing also happened when I changed my modem 7-8 years ago after my venerable Alcatel Speedtouch died.
So, in retrospect, modem chipset really plays a central role in your home network performance.
For instance, running the Jetstream2 and Speedometer2 tests on https://browserbench.org on Mac OS M1 CPU and Windows 10 Ryzen 3700:
Mac OS M1: Jetstream2 Firefox score of 115. Safari score of 227. Speedometer 2 Firefox score of 203. Safari score of 218.
Windows 10 Ryzen 3700: Jetstream2 Firefox score of 92. MS Edge score of 145. Speedometer 2 Firefox score of 95. MS Edge score of 142.
These are bare metal installs running off the same connection method to the same network. I understand what you are saying about DNSMasq, but I wanted to test out the "seems" portion of his comment. If Firefox seems slower on any particular machine, that is because it is.
Since I mainly use Linux (80%) and Mac (20%), I sometimes think that everyone is using the same OS with me.
You're right, I didn't think of OS dependent performance difference.
However, even with scripts blocked, Firefox eats up a whole lot of CPU power, even on static, unchanging pages. What was <1% is now 5% CPU.
Given the Quantum promise of a speedup, I'm rather underwelmed.
It seems to be that Firefox uses more cpu and better on memory, whereas chrome is the opposite (although by by means is chrome "light" on cpu).
Quantum was a "quantum" leap faster than what FF had become.
I don't like chrome, firefox is feature wise better IMO, but I am not patient enough for it.
Maybe it is just my setup, and the plural of anecdote is not data, so my experience may be an outlier, but I wish it was not my experience.
For the 2% of websites that serve 20 MB of JavaScript, I use Chrome. Works well enough for me.
Before Firefox I used Brave with multiple profiles and it was very painful to use in practice; two sets of extensions, two unlocks of 1Password X, no ability to force certain websites to open in Profile X or Y, etc.
But yes, Firefox feels like it's getting progressively slower and I'm finding more and more things that don't support it. In particular, many of the recent spatial audio tools just flat out refuse to run in Firefox, and tools like Apple Business Manager don't run even though they typically work fine if you spoof the User Agent.
If a Chromium-based browser like Vivaldi or Brave added containers it'd be a very compelling alternative.
The only one I have bookmarked is https://getmibo.com, which claims to "currently only work in Google Chrome"
I understand Safari because it's just a massive pain to develop for because you need custom hardware (and because it lags behind in implementing open standards), but Firefox is perfectly fine for any decent JS application, even if its JS engine is a bit slower. User agent filtering is a thing of the past, web developers need to fix their shitty apps instead of forcing Chrome down everyone's throats.
They said if this scenario becomes reality, they will try to maintain the cut functions if they are indeed good for users. It is a tall order, but I worked/talked with couple of people from different departments and the company seems to maintain the user-centric spirit.
I do not love the HN mentality - I do not like it = it is crap, because I am HN user and I know the best, but I never actually did more than skin deep inspection of the product, or googled my concerns... But I am most definitely capable of judging.
Also, absolutely no tracking protection by default, I've found nothing about how their sync protocol works (is it e2ee?), so I take their argument of "vivaldy is better for your privacy than Chrome" with a grain of salt.
The vast number of settings and features is great, but that's meaningless if the everyday browsing feels like using a bloated website on a Raspberry Pi.
Now of course the devs can do what they want, but if they aim to compete with other browsers they have astounding priorities.
> bloated interface
It looks almost exactly like Chrome to me. I have them side by side and the difference is barely noticeable.
> word processor
I assume you mean its note feature, which I know exists but has never once been used by me nor has it ever gotten in my way.
> minigames
If there are minigames I had no idea they existed. I'm fairly certain Chrome has some though.
> All things work, but none of them work good.
This isn't clear enough to be worth arguing against, but the only thing I'll point out that doesn't "work good" for me is the tab switching interface is sometimes slow and gets "caught" on the tab switching screen. Everything else is business as usual.
> absolutely no tracking protection by default
I'm not sure if they have ever claimed this, nor do I recall if it is enabled by default, but Vivaldi has a built in ad blocker, and you can still install Chrome extensions for additional protection.
> I've found nothing about how their sync protocol works
A quick search for "Vivaldi sync" turned up this: "You also need to pick an encryption password that is used for encrypting your data. Your encryption password is used locally on your computer for encrypting the data you’re about to send to our servers and to decrypt the received data. Your encryption password is never sent to us or any other third party, which ensures that we cannot decrypt your data." [0] (Also linked from the article you're commenting on.)
Maybe that isn't the technical detail you're looking for but it's not "nothing."
I'm not fully sold on "doesn't belong in browser" - arguably, it the browser is almost like an OS, it is not far fetched to ask for such features. I guess that is also what ChromeOS does.
It was promised from its first technical preview that it would eventually have a built in mail client.
It isn't "bloat" any more than a screwdriver on a Swiss army knife is bloat. It's one of the key features of the browser going forward. If you believe browsers should not have built in mail clients, well, that's why alternatives exist. It's Vim vs the IDE debate, at some point you just have to accept that some people want the bare bones editor and some people want the full featured experience and there's nothing wrong with either approach.
Opera used to have notes and I doubt they ever had a CVE due to it.
This is basically the old Opera approach. Vivaldi was created by the Opera founders, is made up of ex-Opera staff, and has the goal of recreating an Opera 12-esque browser experience on top of the Chromium engine. If you liked Opera 12, you'll like their "bloated / OS-replacement" (also highly customisable, almost everything is removable) UI approach. If you didn't like Opera 12, you likely won't.
If you haven't tried the latest snapshots you're in for a treat: the UI now bundles a full calendar and mail client :D
I use Firefox as my daily driver today, but I was an Opera 12 user: the UI was bloated-by-default out of the box but the two important caveats were: (1) 100% customisability allowing you to streamline it easily, and (2) bloat never impacted performance at all (in fact Opera was the most performant browser back then for heavy tab use, even while the integrated mail client was indexing hundreds of incoming mails). I can see perf. being a bigger challenge for Vivaldi though since they have less control over the Chromium foundations... Curious to see how they get on with this.
> I've found nothing about how their sync protocol works
As far as I've seen they haven't released the source of their sync server[0] or protocol, but the mechanism seems similar enough to Chrome that they've likely stuck to using a similar protocol, just with their own server endpoint(s). It prompts me to use macOS keychain for sync encryption, as Chrome does, so this seems to strongly imply e2e.
The internals UI[1] also gives some nice data for the curious. It shows e2e as being enabled for me, but it looks like it isn't always (possibly only newer versions of Vivaldi support e2e and they need some kind of backward compat.)
[0] https://bifrost.vivaldi.com/
[1] vivaldi://sync-internals
"it's never quite the same as the first time you fall in love"
I'll give it another chance one of these days, though. I'm hearing a lot of news about it lately so I suppose there will be improvements and maybe the newer versions are closer to what I want.
I'm still on Firefox for a few reasons but I've been checking it out as it evolves, and been pleasantly surprised with progress over time.
There's a few things that I think are inherent to Chromium, that I doubt they'll ever get back; one of these is definitely MDI. But on the other hand, there's also a few things that I believed were Presto-specific (HTML renderer-related, e.g. text-selection of link text) that they have somehow managed to re-implement on top of Chromium, so never say never.
> Unfortunately, Vivaldi wasn't recreating that when I tried it.
Yeah, Vivaldi is not snappy. But... given the state of browser UI performance today (massively regressed from 8 years ago), it compares favourably to competitors. Which isn't to be sniffed at considering they've added so many things on top of the beast that is Chromium.
Despite the apparent bloat of the default experience, what it really does is just increases discoverability of the UI for new users. While things like gestures, keymaps, etc. still allow people to run a very slimmed down browser if desired.
I was using Vivaldi back then, it used to freeze whole browser once or twice a week, which was unacepptable when I was doing ie. demo of new version. Such freeze took few minutes to recover from, and the whole call was 30 min of length.
After switching back to Safari problem was gone.
So for me Vivaldi is big NO.
One means 'too many features' (without impact on performance of other features). Maybe it makes things harder to figure out (though not necessarily). But it doesn't impact speed of execution, away from the bloat.
The other is like a fat bloated human who just got finished eating way too much. Their belly distended, they find it hard to run or lift something heavy. They are slowed down.
Vivaldi seems bloated in the first way, sure. It's like, a "wall of features". But it doesn't seem to me to be slow as a result. It seems faster than Chrome, Safari, or Firefox on my (macOS) main computer.
True, I don't need most of the features. (But I love a few of them, such as the OmniWeb-style thumbnail tabs.)
But I am not disadvantaged by them at all.
I generally have 5-6 browsers open, and Vivaldi recently is usually among them. If it had in-built tracking protection (like Safari), or no-effort ad blocking (like Brave), it would probably be one of my "main" browsers.
This is why we need more users on non-Chrome browsers. I'm sad that Microsoft ditched Edge, and a major reason that I use Firefox is to keep Google from 100% control of the web (well I guess 95% of non-iPhone users). Vivaldi noted that this is a problem, but instead of helping they made it worse. "Not in my backyard" at its finest.
The only thing that can unseat chrome is competition from another well funded corporation, not some fringe activist MBAs who cannot keep engineering talent.
which makes a lot of sense since we mostly have widescreens and tab titles need to be readable - the alternative is to go for minimalism and not be a tab hoarder.
Vivaldi also has a tab management panel where you can select multiple tabs and close them (it also lists the closed tabs if you want to reopen any), or bookmark all of them, etc.
Edit to add: ah, #2 in link above is also another great feature: Hit F2 and get a Spotlight-esque search. If you have 100 tabs open in 4 windows and want to jump to a particular tab, you can hit F2 and type in part of the title, e.g. "Wikipedia", and it will suggest your open tabs which has "Wikipedia" as part of the title, as well as recently closed tabs.
In addition to a lot of awesome features (one of my other favorites is side by side tabs), it’s a browser which treats me like an adult and gives me control over how it works. The configuration section can be overwhelming at times, but they provide a lot of knobs and switches to customize the browser how I want.
I definitely recommend giving it a spin!
My personal computers are also my work computers, so it's very handy to use Vivaldi for everything work-related. Chromium for testing, Firefox for personal (containers, noscript, and I trust Mozilla more).
i cannot grasp why browsers abandoned the vertical-tab ui. is there something difficult about it?
Firefox is my main personal browser
Chrome is on the second monitor with twitch and social networking sites
Edge is my work browser
Vivaldi is for my part time job
I also keep Waterfox installed for the old version of video download helper which works on some videos the new version doesn't work on.
Choosy OSX as the main browser. This is just a proxy to launch browsers depending on urls, not an actual browser.
Chrome for Google Drive, Apps, whatever they call it today
Firefox for Whatsapp + Facebook and for websites where I need multiple identities via containers (e.g. company & personal Amazon)
Safari for everything else.
There some overlap, but the main goal is to not be logged onto Google or Facebook in my main browser.
I like to think my countermeasures work, but I am under no illusion that no one out there someone has a big fat fingerprint of mine.
I also use Next DNS and often route my connection to a Wireguard VPS.
Phew! Life's hard on the modern internet.
The user interface isn't perfect, but the tabs work well, the keyboard short-cuts work well, and you can install any of the Chrome extensions you want to ad-blocking, etc
TLDR: They are a business, and lot of FOSS projects get forked or raped by likes of Amazon. I love FOSS, but I understand they want to run a business. Big part of the product is open, but some parts are not deliberately. It might not be for you, and that is cool, pick what you want.
[0] https://vivaldi.com/source/ exists but only releasing tarballs is pretty lame, there's no source repository where I can browse/fork, no public bug tracker where I can contribute to issue reports. A conventional, permissive, free-software license is not in use, as far as I can tell.
Vivaldi wouldn't behave like any of the other software that runs on my computer. That's not good.
I understand and appreciate that Vivaldi is different from Chrom(e|ium). That just doesn't make a difference to me.
How does https://iridiumbrowser.de/ compare to https://brave.com and https://vivaldi.com ?
It seems like Iridium can install any Chrome plugins and is available in the normal repos for Debian/Ubuntu, FreeBSD, etc (as well as Windows/Mac), but it's not backed by a company (and the company's marketing dollars), so it might be even more privacy-focused. (I do see a lot more crashes with Iridium than Brave on a systemd-removed Debian-based system, however.)
In short what we did is pretty much the same thing as other Chromium mods: take the Chromium source and add a bunch of features on top of it. Some features that I could remember:
* English dictionary / translator (our market's native language is not English)
* Video downloader (includes Youtube)
* Torrent client
* Multithreaded downloading
* Facebook unblocker. The company operates a bunch of proxy servers, and the browser can be remotely configured to proxy certain sites through those servers. Handy when the government decides to block Facebook/Medium/...
* PIP video before Chrome has one
* Sidebar
There's a guy in their forums saying two years ago that "iPhone usage will drop to mac level usage (~8%)"[1], which is laughable.
[1] https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/31772/mobile-vivaldi-for-ios...
There are still billions users without smartphones in the world (especially in Africa and India), and most of them will be getting Android devices.
77% of Indians use a smartphone, won't say billions
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/worldw...
The only exception is Opera Mini, which is a frontend for Opera's cloud-based HTML rendering infrastructure, [1] so it doesn't count as a browser under Apple's rules. (Opera Mini for iOS has been discontinued.)
[0] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#thi...
- Quick commands popup (imagine Sublime Text/Visual Code Ctrl Shift P) - Keyboard shortcuts to do anything, especially to hide and show tab bar, hide and show address bar and even hide title bar - Ublock Origin works (compared to Safari)
What stopped me using after a week
- Energy consumption is toooo high (compared to using Firefox/Safari) that kept me close to the electric outlet.
This seems a little dismissive of the Servo project.
I disagree. The servo project has not (yet) "built a new engine from scratch". In fact it is very far from being a complete engine, if you look at their "Remainig Work" Page[^1].
BTW, last year, they focused on Virtual Reality, which isn't helpful to build a basic web engine. According to their roadmap[^2], they're not even sure of what their long-term target is: a new web browser or an embedable lib.
Since I like, and have, to use multiple broswers (mostly Vivaldi, Firefox and Brave) the customisation is a bit overwhelming. Were it my only browser I doubt that would be an issue.
The "zero tracking" aspect aligns with our own values, as a search engine company. We are not a "partner" so this comment is not coloured by that.
Vivaldi allows our search users to set up Mojeek and other search engines/services in fair way using codes; a bit like !bangs; shown here for Vivaldi search partners and Mojeek. https://blog.mojeek.com/2020/11/popping-your-filter-bubble-w...
WPE claims to focus on embedded and low-consumption computer.
Where can I get a nice optimized precompiled binary for the common platforms? I tried luakit in raspberry, very slow, even slower than default chromium.
I am talking about Brave. Skip it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...
Vertical tabs is the one that most comes to mind. For people with many tabs open, tabs at the top is a completely broken experience. Tree style tabs is OK but it doesn't remove the redundant tabs at the top, cluttering the screen.
Edit: If you want to compete for market share with chrome, this is a great way to do it! =)
note: I'm already using a windows machine and am not much of a privacy evangelist. But, Vivaldi is an excellent browser with a neat feature set and I totally see its appeal to power users.
1. Search engine partners
2. Affiliate links on 'Start Page'
All what you need to know
thou wish they'd put more effort into tab-grouping, the tabkit ff-plugin pushed this to perfection some time ago.
I mean, having one dominating browser engine is a sickness (it weakens the standards) and not something internet companies should embrace. But I understand their reasoning about resources.
It is just as much Google as Vivaldi is google because both uses Chromium.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/chromium-ad-blockers-choice/
And here's the follow up:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/ad-blocker-vivaldi-browser/
> First, Google decided to push on with discontinuing APIs used by several content blockers from the extension manifest v3. At the time, we made a promise to find a solution.
>
> Keeping support for the affected extensions (as with anything that gets discontinued in Chromium) would have been hard. Google usually removes most of the code a discontinued feature depends on and refactors anything that code relies on. So after a few versions, you end up with a patch that’s tough to apply every time.
I am reaching a little but their use of past tense makes me feel like they've decided.
"We need more than deplatforming"
"Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms."
Right from your link. Wake up.
I can 100% understand how some people can conflate "deplatforming" with censorship (there is an argument to be made that they're the same thing), but this isn't calling for deplatforming.
It specifically states: deplatforming has been done, but what we actually really need is these 4 extra (non-censorship-related) things.
I'm curious to hear an explanation of how either of the following 4 things are censorship:
1. advertising transparency
2. selection algorithm transparency
3. algorithmic boosting of fact-checked sources
4. funding academic research into the impact of online platforms
Firefox on Windows has the same behavior for me. Actually, Windows as a whole does this.
IME (on Linux), browsers freezing like this usually has to do with them having hardware acceleration enabled. I had this problem for the longest time with Chrome on a previous computer and since I have started disabling acceleration as the first step after installing a browser, the problem has gone away.