Hands-on with Vivaldi, the new Web browser for power users
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Vivaldi may collect visitor statistics. The visitor statistics may include information about the visitors IP-addresses, usage patterns, <…>
I guess I don't want your shiny new browser.
Facebook "likes", Google analytics, New Relic monitoring, and any of numerous other tools can do this.
Which is why I'm loaded for bear with noscript, adblock, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, and numerous entries in my /etc/hosts file for particularly noxious / ubiquitous sites.
Also: I was looking for something on mainstream retailer sites and was amazed at the list of servers. How many TargetImg servers does it take to load a product page? Answer: At least four, plus all the other tracking/ad loading detritus. Just wow.
I'm not accusing you of this, but in other cases I've seen proponents of something say "This isn't a big deal, it's just starting out". Then, when people continue to complain a year from now, the defenders say "This isn't a big deal, it's always done this."
Vivaldi looks interesting, but I'd wager that there's a decent overlap between the Power Users they're after, and the group that values their privacy the most.
This is incorrect in the world I live in, and I do not want to visit a world where it is correct.
In spite of that Vivaldi looks interesting, and as a long-time fan of Opera (the original company and the browser) I wish them well.
I don't know about Firefox, but Internet Explorer definitely warns about addons that slow down launch times and opening new windows/tabs.
It's such simple functionality, but really makes a huge difference both for performance and privacy and it saddens me that Opera never will be what it once was, and probably no other browser either. :-(
Now, Firefox might be able to fill the void, but I doubt Chrome ever can. Those kinds of features are an irritant to Google, because they want their pervasive analytics, ads, and various web-apps to work out of the box.
1. Speed 2. Privacy 3. Add-ons/features (and this is far below 1 and 2).
This browser collects all sorts of information (seemingly more than chrome based on the message from instillation), and consumes an absurd amount of memory per tab, even on plain text webpages.
There may be something promising there, but this isn't it.
Firefox and Chrome also collect the same information, but it is an opt-in from what I remember.
Edit:
Chrome usage with 3 tabs: http://i.imgur.com/mGiX0So.png
Vivaldi usage with the same tabs: http://i.imgur.com/ejnNzib.png
Uhm, reference? I seriously doubt that...
Second, here's google chrome's privacy policy:
https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/
You can see that they have all kinds of information being sent to google. At least as much as Vivaldi.
Lots of new browsers have launched since 2008, and Vivaldi certainly isn't a major browser yet, if it ever will be.
> And since Chrome arrived in 2008, the Web hasn't seen another major browser launch—until now.
The contested bit is "until now". Either you have to drop the major from the classification for until now to make sense, in which case there have been tons of minor browsers released since then, or you have to classify this new browser as major, which is a stretch.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159709
Sure, these aren't major browsers -- neither is Vivaldi, yet, and its purely speculation that it might be in the future.
Many browsers have differentiated only on the UI side; none have really succeeded. As another example, Flock.
The 4 actually major browsers have all brought major new innovations: Firefox was a different rendering engine than IE (and much better in pretty much every aspect, except legacy website support); Safari launched with WebKit (a new major fork of KHTML with many improvements); Chrome in turn launched using a major fork of WebKit (bringing process isolation and a completely new JS engine, v8).
Vivaldi brings nothing like that to the table. It's interesting to see new UI ideas, of course. But for the article to call it "the first new major browser in many years" makes me immediately wonder if the author doesn't own Vivaldi stock (which of course is not the case; but the point is that it seems unjustifiably positive on the product).
Firefox's innovation wasn't the rendering engine, per se, but everything surrounding it, including add-ons.
At the same time, I'm deeply worried that they believe they have to rebuild everything, including the mail client, to get to their first official release. Opera had a long pattern of rough but innovative releases that took a while to stabilize, and I can't help but believe that with them emphasizing feature completeness first, it's going to be rough for quite some time.
Given the high bar set by modern browsers I'm not sure users--power users especially--will put up with the associated quirks long enough for Vivaldi to gain traction.
Chrome is of course mostly open source, except for some proprietary bits. The same is basically true of Vivaldi (and Opera), they all add a relatively small amount of proprietary code on top of the massive open source Chromium codebase.
* Preinstalled proprietary plugins (Widevine, Flash) * More preinstalled codecs (woohoo, patents!) * Various user metrics reporting
There is a pretty big difference between that and keeping all of your changes private.
Also, Opera has been contributing to Blink, so they aren't keeping all their changes private.
Vivaldi hasn't launched yet, but I would guess the same would be true of them - it just isn't rational to do otherwise (if Vivaldi fixes some small bug in Blink, why keep it as a patch they need to constantly reapply on top of Blink? Far easier to upstream it).
So aside from the UI (which is tiny compared to the entire browser), Chrome, Blink and Vivaldi are about equal in terms of being open or closed.
I was a pretty die-hard Opera fan for many years, so this news really piqued my interest... up until I learned the software is not libre.
Upgrading my laptop to 32GB RAM was one of those things where you wish you had done it a lot earlier. No more OOM-killers, no more things grinding to a halt because the box is swapping (in fact, I disabled swap altogether), no more checking memory utilisation before starting a beefy VM.
Just smooth sailing all along.
Only if you are already a hardcore vim user and want that functionality in your browser, tons of people don't care
So I would say I have given it a fair shot. But what browser am I using now? Chrome. Sometimes when you want to get something done you don't need to find that the maximise/minimise buttons are somewhere different, and with Ubuntu/Unity + Vivaldi they are - 90's style, in the top-right hand side.
I was actually a late convert to Chrome, for a long time I 'needed' Firebug and found the Chrome F12 tools to be inferior, or with a learning hurdle. With Vivaldi there is no leap of re-learning required, but, it doesn't have anything extra that I need for the day job. A regular incognito window does all I need for testing, with the UX chrome in the expected places. Note I also have the indispensable 'Hover Zoom' and 'Vim bindings'.
Most people just use incognito mode for that.
If you want to make a customizable browser, give us the option to not install such unnecessary addons. The browser already seems to use as much memory as chrome, it does not need to waste any more.
I used Opera pre-12, and the reason I did so was because all of the features that I wanted were baked-in to the browser, which meant that they went through the same quality controls and integration testing as the rest of the browser. There was no separate step of updating add-ons, or even worse having outdated add-ons with no compatible version. Everything Just Worked.
Granted, some of the features were not as feature-complete as comparable Firefox add-ons. E.g., tab-stacking is strictly inferior to tree-style tabs because there is only one level of collapse. But everything I wanted was already included, at an acceptable-enough level that for me, it outweighed the cost of having to comparison-shop for mouse gestures or custom CSS solutions or whatever.
FWIW, Opera never felt "bloated" to me. It had crop-tons of features, but for whatever reason that didn't translate to a feeling of bloat. The browser was fast and responsive, and the pile of features never really got in my way. Every once in a while, I would read about an interesting Firefox add-on, dig into the Options menu, and find out Opera had the feature all along, whereupon I would drag it onto the UI.
Personally I like having the email built-in to the browser because it means I don't have to context-switch to see the status of my inbox. But that's a personal quirk.
Is there any major browser that doesn't allow you to do this?
(I mostly use it as a frequently-wiped-configs-and-cache bare rendering test.)
When I click the ?, nothing happens. Any idea what this is?
Does anyone know this feature of Firefox?
holy crap I am old ...cello anyone? :|
Install NoScript and browse for a couple days. Permanently whitelist what you have to on sites you frequent and trust.
You'll find that pages load light-years faster, browser hangs/crashes are non-existent, annoying advertisements are a thing of the past, and actually, most web sites work fine without Javascript. Even though some of these websites have literally dozens (I suspect sometimes even hundreds: they sometimes chain each other and the full list takes up my entire screen and scrolls for a while) of scripts from different domains.
And then you get used to this web, and all of a sudden there's you run across what should be just a plain-text article - not a web application - and you discover that you have to enable Javascript just to see any text and it feels a little absurd. This is definitely the exception, and not the rule. My whitelist, after years of browsing, is pretty small.
A lot of websites are much quicker to load with NoScript active in my experience. It's quite an eye opener going somewhere like The Guardian's website, or Salon, and seeing the amount of 3rd party js that loads on every page. If one of those hosts is slow to respond, or down, it can often slow the whole pageload.
I also dislike executing fb, twitter, etc.. widgets all over the place, as well as giving over cpu time to chartbeat, scorecardresearch, and the like.
The tradeoff is that I have to right-click and selectively enable some js from site.com, othersitehost.com and aws-mumbo-jumbo-belonging-to-site.com for some sites that I care enough to read. Sure, the first time I load a site it's more work, but regular sites get necessary js whitelisted.
Personally, I'm happy with this tradeoff - I don't go around recommending it, but it works for me. HTH :)
There are web applications that need JavaScript, and I'm fine with that. There's lot of cool stuff JS could be used for, and it's not used - check out Bret Victor's explorable explanations. But instead doing something useful with this power, web designers and developers just use JS to make "shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking message" - as the quote from a very insightful article goes[0].
In any case, there are other ways to track you without the use of scripts.
This is the new web first world, where everyone is obligated to maintain finely-tuned block lists for various trackers and hostile JavaScript, run adblockers that prefilter sites and click on various odd-looking rectangles to get that plugin to run. The web is a joke.
Sent from my w3m