[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2006/02...
[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2006/02...
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.
I'm probably in a minority, but for me anything that gets in the way of me opening a new tab and loading a webpage in it is just harm.
I'm not looking forward to the Monterey tab design tho' when I eventually have to upgrade to a "current"-ish version.
And that's after switching it to the more-classic-like version that keeps the URL bar separate.
The tab groups are sort of cool, but they're bugged for me (opening a link in a new tab results in a blank tab, after briefly displaying the intended content after I switch to it, but only in named groups, not in the default unnamed tab group) and their relationship or lack of relationship with windows keeps throwing me off. Overall this feels like something the window manager should handle, in some fashion, though I admit existing features aren't quite enough to cover what it does. It also seems like the whole concept needs to be integrated with bookmarks. All in all, good direction, but something's still missing.
Oh, and I also forget to switch to them, so haven't used them at all since about the first week after initially setting a few useful ones up. I need a way to at least tell Safari to open tabs for certain sites in certain tab groups, regardless of where I start to load them. Otherwise I end up with the same 100+ tabs in the unnamed tab group as I always have.
Preferences -> Tabs -> Uncheck "Show color in tab bar"
As a Linux Desktop user however, I don't care about UI speed since my browser usage is mostly static, a few documentation pages, a lot of heavy tabs at work (JIRA, Gmail, Chat, Teams, web related projects, etc). Maybe I have a powerful desktop bias since my Ryzen doesn't seem to have any visible performance hit, either Chromium, Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi open tabs in a flash. On my laptop (also Linux) every browser feels a bit sluggish though with Chromium being the fastest. Macs (specially the new M1s) are a different beast and feels like Safari is specially optimized for them.
Maybe it's been designed specifically for that 0.1%? There's nothing wrong with not catering to the masses.
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.
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'm curious - what features does Vivaldi have that add cognitive load to users not using them?
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.
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.
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.
Being based on Chromium is the only thing that keeps me from using it as my main browser.