I've tried multiple times. Basically, you get an absolutely bloated interface (or should I say OS-replacement?), containing a word processor and minigames. All things work, but none of them work good.
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.
Same here. I've tried it at least once a year and it still has
the same issues it had on day one. The UI is incredibly slow and
has an input delay on most mouse inputs. I gave up on it when
they introduced Philips Hue remote controls instead of fixing
the overall user experience or adding features like bookmark &
settings sync(Light controls don't have a place in a web
browser, ever, unless it's an opt-in addon).
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.
I've read in another comment that they introduced mail and calendar tools and already was dumbfounded. But Philips Hue integration? At some point you just probably can replace gnome/kde/... With this "browser"
Yes, Vivaldi has this feature where the window borders change
color based on the active website's color scheme. Then one day
they decided to let the browser also connect to Hue lights so
they can also change color in sync with the browser window.
Now of course the devs can do what they want, but if they aim to
compete with other browsers they have astounding priorities.
I've been using it as a daily driver for two years and don't understand what you're talking about.
> 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."
It doesn't have calendar or mail at the moment. Note taking is probably very simple. I am not sure if it lets you take notes per web site, or just in general.
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.
This is a fine and valid opinion, but it's a philosophical difference. Vivaldi literally exists because Opera dropped support for their mail client and other features.
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.
> you get an absolutely bloated interface (or should I say OS-replacement?)
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.)
I love Opera 12 (and older versions), I still miss their customizability and efficiency today. I tried Vivaldi when it was in beta (or maybe alpha, I don't remember. The first few publicly downloadable versions) and unfortunately it didn't meet my needs: it did have customizability, but didn't support some of the most useful Opera 12 features for my workflow (e.g. MDI) and even more importantly, the UI had a quite bad latency. As you mention, the Opera UI did have a lot of stuff (which you could choose to use or not) but it was the snappiest by a mile. Unfortunately, Vivaldi wasn't recreating that when I tried it.
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.
> didn't support some of the most useful Opera 12 features for my workflow (e.g. MDI)
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.
To go further on the question of the UI being "bloated", here's a quick reference shot of what a very slightly customised Vivaldi UI might look like[0] (for anyone who hasn't yet downloaded it to try it out).
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.
In one of my projects we used Google Hangouts as our main tool for video calls.
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.
My take on this is there are two common meanings of 'bloated'.
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.
I actually tried Vivaldi the other day for the first time in a while, and every so often the browser frame/chrome just completely freezes on macOS. Tabs will not close, I couldn't open any new tabs etc. So it was a non-starter for me, hopefully this is an isolated issue. A bit of a shame because purely from a browser frame UI perspective I found it refreshing (however I do dislike the left/bottom bars). But one thing that irritated me is the right-click menu doesn't appear until you release the mouse rather than just when pressed. I do however acknowledge that's an entirely pedantic issue of personal preference.
I haven't used Windows in any real capacity since the early days of Windows 7. As I say this is definitely a personal preference thing that i've likely picked up in recent years. It's just mildly annoying to me that every other browser I use has it on mouse press rather than release
This is how it should be - mouse actions trigger on releasing the button, not when pushing it. It allows the user to correct a mistake if they accidentally pressed the button, because they can move the mouse away from the clicked object and the action will not trigger. Many modern self-cooked UI systems seem to forget about this, it's just sad.
Seeing as we are in a thread on Vivaldi, a spiritual successor to Opera where mouse gestures were quite important for the overall experience, I'll go with "actions on mouse down are just fine".
But didn't Opera gestures always end on mouse-up? That makes it even more important that a context menu only opens on mouse-up, because otherwise you would potentially both open the menu and execute an action at the same time.
This is exactly why some people (including me) prefer this idiom -- right click down to make a context menu appear, nudge the mouse over a few pixels to select e.g. the back button, mouse-up and there you go.
On the mac context menus show up on mouse down. This is so you can click, then drag the the menu entry you want, then release the button to select the menu entry. Overall there is only one click, not two. Some people find it faster.
> the browser frame/chrome just completely freezes on macOS
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.
Cynically speaking, it won't matter if Brave continues to support the web request API, since all the other chromium variants aren't going to be. Once the market for extensions is 99% unable to support an API, it won't matter if the remaining 1% still does; developers simply won't target it.
What's your source on Vivaldi abandoning it? Last I heard they hadn't chosen yet. If they go full Manifest V3 then I'll have to abandon my thoughts of returning to Vivaldi (on Firefox now but there are some annoyances).
> 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.
Firefox is my main browser, but I have Vivaldi installed for when I need to check if something works properly in Chromium. Having a vertical tab bar out of the box is my main motivation for that.
I was on a search for a good browser for an older machine that was lighter on resources. I tried vivaldi but ended up with SlimBrowser and have been happy so far with the experience.
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.
I second the tabs on the side. This was the main reason I even gave Vivaldi a try. I’ve been using it daily for over two and a half years now.
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.
Totally - vertical tab list, tiled tabs, "hibernate background tabs" and even a little note taking app with markdown and screenshot capability built in.
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).
Roughly speaking, yes. Alternative browsers for iOS can offer a different UI or a different way of handling bookmarks, but they're always powered by the same rendering engine and JavaScript engine that Safari uses. Apple even seems to forbid extending the capabilities of WebKit and JavaScript Core, presumably you wouldn't be permitted to add support for additional video codecs for instance. [0]
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.)
I keep wanting to give it a good go, but I'm hooked on containers in Firefox (with cookie auto delete) which is a shame because FF just seems to be getting slower for me, and the dev tools have fallen behind Chrome IMO
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.
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.
I don't know which DNS server PiHole uses or whether it's configured to cache normal DNS queries too.
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.
It can be a lot slower depending upon the machine and OS it is installed on.
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.
My Firefox setup blocks JavaScript by default. It has been peachy with NoScript and a bunch of other addons since forever. After Firefox switched to the new "Quantum" verion, my extensions got reshuffled and I'm using uMatrix to block scripts.
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.
My experience with Firefox quantum was the opposite. Ff became immediately faster and more useable. Experience seems to vary by hardware, sites, and add-ons.
I don't use it that often, but last I tried switching to it this was also one of my biggest problems, it was simply using too much resources when it was literally doing nothing, where chrome, doing much more, used much less CPU power.
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.
Firefox is slower with pure Javascript performance (factor 2 in my experience), but Chrome blew it with hardware rasterization. This slows down rendering large SVGs by up to a factor 10, so for our app Firefox is much much faster unless you disable hardware rasterization on Chrome. It obviously depends on the use case.
I don't have a good comparison since I don't use Chrome on desktop much apart from development. But for me Firefox + containers + ublock origin is good enough for 98% websites.
For the 2% of websites that serve 20 MB of JavaScript, I use Chrome. Works well enough for me.
The killer feature of containers for me is keeping Google isolated. I've degoogled my personal life but still have to use it for work (i.e. G-Suite SSO). I can force all those sites to open in my work container which leaves my other containers Google-free.
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.
Sorry, I just realised my comment was ambiguous. The apps claim not to support Firefox, and then I'd just close the app without trying with a spoofed UA - so it's not necessarily a technical issue.
The only one I have bookmarked is https://getmibo.com, which claims to "currently only work in Google Chrome"
Honestly, when I see an application that works with Chrome exclusively, I just conclude that the application is either bad or not finished yet and ignore it.
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.
It's not really an ideal solution but I do find wiping my profile/firefox config directory periodically helps speed it up. It seems to get heavier over time.
Is Chrome a RAM hog and therefore faster than FF?
I exclusively use FF and find it a bit sluggish, but am fine to give up some speed for the privacy gain.
What are you using to auto delete the cookies? I tried doing this but didn't find an elegant solution for something that seems like an obvious feature.
I love how people get their panties in the bunch over FOSS, yet they are completely fine with tomfoolery like their browser hijacking links and inserting their affiliate codes into them.
The question which need to be asked about Chrome clones and mods is not what additional features they have added or removed. That is still "addons" territory. The question which needs be asked - did you (developer) made any different decision at all about Google made decision. E.g. Google decides to abandon some protocol, or add support of some protocol, or whey decided to abandon some core option which adblockers depend on etc. Did you (developer) made a different decision at that point, forked code and maintain your decision independently from Google. Until that happens all the Chrome mods are just that - slightly lagging behind Chrome versions with addons.
Chrome is a privacy nightmare. They push you hard to use a Google account and suck up your searches and private data. It’s an avoidable browser for privacy and a free Internet because if that alone.
> Google decides to abandon some protocol, or add support of some protocol, or whey decided to abandon some core option which adblockers depend on etc.
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.
I like how they mention KHTML and Gecko/Quantum as it gives a good perspective, but I feel like the reasoning behind 'chromium' is the defacto internet standard is pretty weak.
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.
I interned at a company which makes Chromium mods tailored for a specific market (not Vivaldi), so AMA.
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/...
Why does most of the chromium based browser so ungrateful to them. Vivaldi doesn't mention Chromium in the homepage even once but has "Chrome vs Vivaldi" comparison in the homepage. At least they should mention it, and better contribute back to it, if the 99.9% of your product is based on open source project.
I was using Vivaldi when something needed to be done using Chromium. After MS updated Edge, it got an outstanding built-in text-to-speech engine, I couldn't find any more merit towards moving back to Vivaldi (since I love using that feature, it was a deal-maker).
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.
The most common reason to use multiple browsers is account isolation (to make tracking harder or to use multiple accounts, e.g. personal+work). At work I just use Firefox as it has handy containers feature built-in. My home laptop is too old and slow to run Firefox comfortably so I use Chrome and Chromium (with different visual styles configured - for easier visual distinction) as 2 separate "containers". I probably am going to start using Vivaldi when I need one more.
Yeah I use Firefox and then Chrome on my 2nd monitor, but I really want to switch the Chrome to using Vivaldi, which I have installed, but always forget to get around to doing stuff with.
I like having two different browser to reduce bloat and ram issues when I have too many tabs open or if one browser freezes up I still have 2nd to use and I generally use chrome for debug/dev, but Firefox for actual primary everything.
Containers are great when you have 3 Etsy shops that all need to be logged in at once!
I got the impression that their developers mainly use Windows when I tried it on Linux. It wasn't possible to resize tab title font and the interface was nowhere near the responsiveness I remembered from Opera.
There's 4 bullet points in that link. None of them are related to censorship.
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
"Advertising transparency" would certainly have a chilling effect on speech. Also, the article clearly supports the censorship that has already occurred by saying that "Additional" action is needed which is quite a bit more than just "deplatforming has been done".
Ugh. I bounce between Chrome, Firefox, and Brave. I really want to be able to support Firefox, in order to diversify the browser ecosystem, but every year or so they do or say something that just makes me want to wash my hands of them forever.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadAlso, 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."
[0] https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tools/sync/
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.
[0] https://ibb.co/F6SkHKV
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.
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.
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.
i cannot grasp why browsers abandoned the vertical-tab ui. is there something difficult about it?
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).
this is how I feel about Vivaldi too, and coincidentally about KDE as well
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.
[1] https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os
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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini
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.
I am talking about Brave. Skip it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...
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.
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.
thou wish they'd put more effort into tab-grouping, the tabkit ff-plugin pushed this to perfection some time ago.
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
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.
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.
1. Search engine partners
2. Affiliate links on 'Start Page'
[0] https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
"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