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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to Vivaldi!

There is a good interview with Vivaldi founder on Tedium [1] where he basically says that because most browsers are built on Chromium nowadays, you have to innovate on features and that is the direction they took. And really the number of features in Vivaldi is staggering including some great ones like Tab Stacking and Tab Tiling.

But adding this many features took a toll on performance and it is about 25% slower than other Chromium based browsers. Also I assume that is the reason why is there no Vivaldi on iOS.

[1] https://tedium.co/2021/02/05/vivaldi-browser-history-profile...

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

I'm using Brave on my iPhone right now.

It's safari with a skin and some cryptoscams.

I really wish the crypto garbage would be dropped from Brave. Makes it feel jumbled and spammy after a fresh install.

Well, yes, except no. Brave on iOS is Webkit with a fancy wrapper.

TIL!

A shitty wrapper. The answer to the question “why isn’t there another middleman between content and readers, scamming both?”

To be more accurate there are no Blink or Gecko based browsers on iOS. Both Firefox and Chrome (and many other Chromium browsers) exist on iOS, using WebKit rendering engine.

Technically correct, but the Firefox and Chrome listed in the iOS lockdown store are basically just skins on top of WebKit, not actually different web browsers (like they are on Android and other modern operating systems).

It sounds like the EU and others may be fixing this soon by forcing Apple to allow other app stores on their devices if they want to continue selling devices in their regions.

Presumably Amazon store / Epic store / etc on iOS will carry real Firefox / Chrome.

What do you mean by skin on top of WebKit? WebKit itself just renders the web page. The browser manufacturer has to build an entire browser and decide how to treat user privacy for example, does it have telemetry and what kind, whether to use native controls or not, what browser features to implement like reader mode, how to handle multiple tabs, gestures etc.. Calling that a skin is same as calling Vivaldi a skin of Chromium disregarding the effort made to make it different.

Well... Yes, Vivaldi is a skin of Chromium, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of effort going into that skin.

The point is that Firefox and Chrome on iOS are not the same browser as Firefox and Chrome on any other platform.

For example, if I get a bug report from someone saying they're using Chrome on mobile, if they then say they're using iOS, that's a whole different kettle of fish from any other Chrome bug report I might get. It's going to be much closer to a Safari-related bug than a Chrome one, in a conventional sense.

For it to be a "skin", there would need to be a default "skin" to "reskin". WebKit has no default 'skin' becase it is just a web view. If you make an app with WebKit you have zero browser features, not even an address bar to type an URL into.

Skin, UI, I take your point, but the point being made elsewhere is not about the semantics of "skin", but the fact that the underlying browser runtime and renderer is not the same between iOS and other versions of browsers. You're unlikely to find a bug report that is caused by the UI of a browser, rather than the runtime.

Also iCab which at least let’s you use the new engine. I don’t think the other browsers even allow that.

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

I'm in the same boat. I've wanted to switch to them for years, but once I get it loaded with my requisite plugins and start using it for a while, the UI inevitably begins to experience random lags and moments of unresponsiveness.

Never a problem in my 4 years of use.

Exactly what I was going to ask. They wrote the UI in javascript with obvious consequences. The day they rewrite it in a normal language they will see me again.

Runs fine on my nothing special 6-7 year old computer. I also disable tab rendering and use the tab side panel instead, I'm not sure if that makes a difference.

it's not that it's slow or resource hogs, it's janky which gives the same impression as being laggy

I see. If you're willing to give it another try, perhaps try and customize away all the fancy bells and whistles (for example I disabled tabs altogether and just use the side panel for displaying the tabs but I'm sure there's other settings as well).

So i just tried it actually, and it's way better than it used to be. Still a bit laggy, but i think I would consider this usable. I do however still see couple hundred ms delays on clicking on random ui elements even after disabling animations.

If anything, Vivaldi seems faster for me than Chrome was. I haven't seen any of the performance slowdowns that other people on this thread have mentioned. Possibly because I haven't enabled the Mail/Calendar/Feeds full-fat option?

I've had some websites that wouldn't load properly and I had to fallback to firefox. (Prior to today, I was using 3.5. So hopefully that has been fixed)

5.0 finally started working on speed of UI. Tab operations no longer slow down with the number of opened Tabs for example.

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

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