Vivaldi Browser 5.0

There is not even one Chromium (or Firefox) based browser on iOS because it's not allowed to publish other browser engines on iOS!

Is the UI still as horribly laggy? I try vivaldi every other year because people say it's faster, but it's almost as if those people only run that beast on a desktop or fully specced 15" laptops

Author of that piece—was great chatting with Jon von Tetzchner. FWIW, I daily drive it on an M1 MacBook Air now that there’s a native Apple Silicon version and I don’t really see the slowdown issues.

Also, his recommendation in the piece of creating a minimal profile is one that I think a lot of people might find valuable when using Vivaldi.

Low performance seems strange, given the perf culture at Opera. I assume they still beat a potato, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaT7thTxyq8

Rather than tab stacks, try Firefox Containers + https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/

It gives you the option to hide all tabs that aren't in your current container. The other advantage it gives over tab stacks in Vivaldi / Edge / Chrome is that they're actually containerized. Tabs in container A can't access anything from tabs in container B.

If you're running a device with low RAM, you can add https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... with the option turned on to discard tabs as soon as they're hidden.

> a ton of unnecessary cognitive load that 0.1% of their users will find useful.

Maybe it's been designed specifically for that 0.1%? There's nothing wrong with not catering to the masses.

There's a lot of browsers out there that already give the experience you want. Like Ungoogled Chromium (or regular Chromium).

I always see a lot of power users being enraged to other browsers when they remove features that the 1~5% of their users use so it's a bit weird to see protests against one of the few browsers that attempt to reverse the oversimplification trend.

Vivaldi's main deal is allowing the user to customize most of their browser. Themes, buttons, custom CSS, even side menu options. Even if they have improved it quite a bit there's still a performance hit.

That's the sort of attitude that's ruining Firefox. They're removing everything that makes it useful in a appempt to turn it into a Chrome clone. Vivaldi is the only remotely viable alternative to Firefox.

Vivaldi is clearly for power users, but you're definitely exaggerating. It's not that complicated, and performance is fine.

Being based on Chromium is the only thing that keeps me from using it as my main browser.

On top of that, their open core model makes it hard to say how secure all that UI is and how pro-user they actually are. In that phone-home test they had some of the worst score n that regard, together with Edge.

It is odd. Also harder to trust a small org.

Maybe an angle to getting a size-able slice of the browser market for a start up at this point would be just being super simple, very private-first, and than have a better development experience + inspector than Chrome's. Then let all the "tech" people push it out. No easy task.

Its mobile browser is fantastic. Much better than Firefox, Opera, or Chrome, IMHO.

> a ton of unnecessary cognitive load

I'm curious - what features does Vivaldi have that add cognitive load to users not using them?

+1 - I _really_ wanted to like Vivaldi, but... no.

Switch browsers then, you have alternatives. Nothing wrong with what they do, this is not the way to appreciate free stuff. We're not in 2003 when IE was your only tool.

Are we offended by too many options now? I want a rendering engine with adblocker and a mail client blended in. Most of my time is spent in a browser when I'm online so, for me, it makes sense for my browser to be as capable as it can.

I've been using Vivaldi for at least a couple of years now - strictly for banking - and I fully agree on the slowness of the application. It's awful.

I came from the original Opera (before it transferred ownership) and I loved the UI/UX and performance of it. I was hoping Vivaldi would replicate that, but it's been an enormous pain in the ass lately with websites either not loading (they work fine in Firefox and Chrome), tabs crashing spontaneously, the app crashing spontaneously, and the horrid performance. These issues seem to occur across my different other laptops also.

I use it exclusively for banking as I said, so it's only used once or twice a month but I would never use Vivaldi on a regular basis with the way it currently works.

I will say though, I really like their mobile app so far. There was a weird tab duplication bug on it earlier in the year and they fixed it really quick, but outside of that it's been pretty great.

> I want a rendering engine and some tabs

Even tabs don't have to be a thing for an app (e.g. a web browser) to manage. A good window manager could tabify anything. This would require a standardized API for windows to expose the opened view URIs to be really good in replacing app-level tabs though.

> making the entire application 1000 times slower than it could have been.

Everything you think you gain in speed in Chrome/Firefox, you instantly lose when having to deal with their oversimplified UX. Vivaldi's focus on features means that I can easily manage and switch between tens of tabs - having an equivalent functionality on other browsers via extensions is both very slow and clunky, and the simple act of switching between two tabs is annoyingly unergonomic. By using Vivaldi I must've gained so far entire days of life that would've been otherwise lost by blindly ctrl-tabbing my way to the desired tab.

It seems like it's just not a browser for you. There are a lot of Chromium based browsers with a lot simpler UIs for those that seek that.

Honestly, what is there to support? Once you strip Chromium of all the code that uses any Google services, more than half the job is done.

That was an interesting read, I was not aware that we got this info from the horse's mouth.

Vivaldi has been criticized because it appears to phone home a lot. I've not tested that myself, but I assumed it was true. I might give it another shot because I do enjoy its Opera-like feel over Chrome or Chromium.

"Speed improvements" in every release but there must be something about the way the browser is implemented that just kills performance/efficiency vs other Chromium browsers. Even a basic test like Speedometer 2.0 shoots out that DOM manipulations are 75% the speed of the same benchmark on Chrome, what on earth is it doing to cause that?

The interface is great but between performance and bugs I've never been able to stay on it for more than a couple of months.

Agreed… there’s very little surface that isn’t taken up by the website, so it makes far less sense than, say a terminal. It’s a uniquely bad fit for theming.

A useable method of styling webpages, however, would be quite interesting. CSS just doesn’t quite work when used generically on all sites, except for maybe font sizes. Chrome’s in-beta automatic dark modes are maybe one working example.

I’d appreciate, for example, some way to make better use of the 6000px of screen width I have. Unfortunately, with mobile-first and portrait-mode prevalence, the trend seems to be going back to optimizing for 800px.

Agree. I've never used one for longer than it took to briefly click to it to see what it looked like.

Users like it, especially if you can customise it. (Winamp comes to mind - themes were a huge deal with it and one of the reasons behind its popularity). And it also generates a lot of community activity around the software, which adds value and provides free publicity.

There is a bigger group of users that care about how cute/fun/whatever their browser looks than the group of users that care about engine improvements and new technology support.

User configurable themes is fantastic!

Look at Firefox now for an example of what happens when developers can introduce their "I know best" themes:

I constantly get confused and think the active tab is next to the actually active tab.

Irony is the idea behind removing actual themability seems to be to prevent people from seeing badly styled browsers, and yet this is the second most annoying one I am aware of. (Chrome annoys me more, not because it is bad but because I don't like Chrome ;-)

Because chrome and firefox literarly thrashed the browser experience. Not everybody loves gray or black and 1 font size does not fit all people.

I wondered about that too. It seems like a bit of "filler content" to be honest. There are not many new features at all, the new thing here is the theme management in first place. The release notes in general are pretty weak compared to pervious releases of Vivaldi.

I mean I don't care there is always a bit of a hanger now and then, I still love Vivaldi. Just saying I can relate to these observation.

I think Chrome handles themes best, at least on Linux. It automatically grabs your GTK stylesheet's color palette and recolors the window accordingly. Combined with proper window decorations, it's a surprisingly "native" feel out of the box.

As far as just colors and font size and such, that used to be an OS feature that every (native) application got for free.

FF had it years and years ago, too. I tried it a bit back then and then stopped, because almost all the themes just made it harder to use. Not sure what's up with their making such a big deal out of adding a weaker and less-customizable version of it recently with their color themes. "We redid an old feature, but worse".

Agree with the bloat issue, I use Vivaldi because tab tiling, which is unique to this browser, but the additional functionality seems like it will become a crippling maintenance burden for a small team. I get that Tetzchner is trying to stand out in a sea of Chrome clones, but things like the Hue bulb integration and especially the not really fun or interesting embedded minigame are particularly egregious examples of things which are just wasting time, as well as introducing bugs and attack surface. Just shows a lack of discipline from the product management. Make this stuff an optional extension or something.

I personally can't live without Firefox capture functionality. Control + shift + S. Very convenient.

It may be similar situation for vivaldi user.

I think the point of that feature is to take a screenshot of the full web page, even the part that is currently scrolled out of view. That's not something that the OS screenshot tool can do.

> "Vivaldi’s built-in Capture tool lets you capture either a Full Page screenshot, or a Selection of the screen that you define. It can be accessed in a number of ways through the Vivaldi UI to give you flexibility in how you implement the tool."

Not difficult, it is the limitation of the OS. Desktop OSes don't have a way to tell the browser to take a screenshot of the full page. So it is limited of what it can do. This is where Firefox and Vivaldi comes in, they provided the tools that allows them to scroll the entire page internally and take a screenshot. If there is a website with 5 pages, the OS only can take a picture of what is actively displaying. The browsers itself can barrow deeper to get a full pages.

There is one issue I have with Vivaldi Capture, it seems to capture the webpage with lower DPI than OS capture tools. Windows and macOS capture tool looks crisp and clean. In Vivaldi, it is not crisp and I have a hard time to read the text in it. Not sure if they improve it lately.

Taking a screenshot on Windows is easy. PrtScn key will copy a screenshot of the current screen to the clipboard, Alt+PrtScn will copy the current window to the clipboard, Windows+PrtScn will save a screenshot of the current screen to the Screenshot folder of the Pictures folder. Additionally, Windows ships with the Snip & Sketch tool which is activated with Windows+Shift+S. It allows you to capture a whole screen, a window, a rectangle or a free form area of a screen. It also has tools for annotating the screenshot.

I don't follow- Doesn't Vivaldi support any chrome extension?

That is complete garbage. Lame Microsoft

This seems to be a new trend - even IBM doesn't allow you to create accounts with non-American / non-BigTech email IDs (for their free cloud offering). Makes you wonder what is going on behind the scenes.

They also won't take hey.com

I don’t think it’s anything against competition, just that they don’t have vivaldi.net on their public email allowlist. They want enterprise customers to pay for enterprise Microsoft services.

I wouldn't be surprised if that because Vivaldi had/has a corporate MS service using the domain in some way. E.g. if I test with one of my personal domains with MX records/email configured it continues just fine, if I test with one of my personal domains without email configure it continues just fine, if I try to create a personal account using my work's domain (tied to O365) it blocks it.

So it's not that you can only register gmail/yahoo/etc it seems that the domain can't already be registered for non personal use at MS. Maybe there are other criteria as well (perhaps a way to explicitly exclude your domain if you don't want people registering it for example) but it's a lot more open than "only these services allowed".

Pretty sure that's no longer the case or used to not be the case as I have a Microsoft account I use on Skype among other MS services that is firstname@lastname.fr

I switched from firefox to vivaldi about a year ago. So far it's been an improvement, tab stacks especially in my opinion.

Mozilla should switch to chromium.

I switched to Brave this past year... so far so good. Firefox is fine, but I need a chromium browser for development, so chromium - google seems like a good alternative. I tried Vivaldi a couple of years ago but it didn't stick... will try again.

What's your problem with FF specifically? I keep hearing people complain, but it seems like the same ol browser to me?

Honest question, how is FireFox becoming unusable for you? I am using it on both Linux and Windows and do not really have any problems with it. Sure, sometimes a web site does not load properly but more often than not is because some add-ons like ad-blocker and no-script are intervening for me. In other cases, its obvious that the website was never tested in anything but chrome. In those cases where I really need it, I have some chromium-based browser as backup on all my devices. But daily work on FireFox is just fine for me.

Your comment reminds me of how people were complaining for a long time that FireFox had become so slow, while I was browsing with multiple dozens of open tabs on my 8GB system all along. I do not want to say that this is not the case for you, but I honestly cannot reproduce it on three different laptops.

If Vivaldi doesn't have a store, then they won't have the choice to follow Google because developers won't be able to make their Manifest V2 extensions available for download.

They declared building their own declarative adblocker, with blackjack and hookers. They have no money to maintain own fork.

Yes.