I don't like it either. I mean it wouldn't bother me that much, it's not a dealbreaker, but it's the kind of minor thing that would prevent me from switching to this browser unless it offers something genuinely advantageous over the existing solutions.
But, just fyi, you can switch off the color changing. At least in this preview release.
M2, the mail client in Opera 12, was one of the main reasons why I stuck to it for a long time.
It was quite usable and seems to be the only mail client which properly supports custom IMAP flags (== tags).
Seems as if it uses the Chrome engine.
I wonder about the differences to Opera then.
Edit: Found also this on the homepage (somewhat hidden under the "Web technology" tab):
We use JavaScript and React to create the user interface — with the help of Node.js, Browserify and a long list of NPM modules. Vivaldi is the web built with the web.
User agent provides further evidence, mine reports to be Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.89 Vivaldi/1.0.83.38 Safari/537.36
It's cool that you use a lot of open source projects. But some of them are under licenses that require the user to be able to download their source code, and it's not obvious right now where (for instance) your Webkit code is. You should probably fix that.
And as an aside - if you're linking LGPLed material into a static binary (as you appear to be doing with Webkit), you need to follow the provisions of section 6(a) of LGPL 2.1 and provide object files that allow the recipient to re-link the binary with a modified copy of the LGPLed work.
According to that, it seems that Vivaldi uses a lot of GPL'd and LGPL'd libraries, and it's not clear that Vivaldi is in compliance with the copyleft requirements of those licenses, nor is it apparent which license Vivaldi is released under as well (be it a FOSS license, some EULA, etc.).
There are also a lot of libraries listed that are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is incompatible with the GNU GPL. Distributing this therefore might not actually be legal, regardless of whether or not it's released under a FOSS license, since those two license families have conflicting requirements for derived works (including works which use those libraries).
YMMV, IANAL, etc., but this thing's running the risk of legal technicalities killing it in the crib.
Please just give us a native window that works like the rest of the application windows on my OS though. What's the need for customizing the UI so that it doesn't fit in with the OS?
Basically, it looks like it's going to be Opera on the Chrome engine, but with the return all the cool unique features Opera ditched when they switched engines a little while back. And hopefully managed by a group that has the spirit from Opera's good old days.
I'm surprised I haven't heard of this until now, it's made by a group of members from the now closed Opera (12) forums. There are people who are fond of the Presto version's features so I'm glad there are efforts like it.
I tried this a while back (a few months?), and it doesn't seem like it has progressed much. I think Vivaldi has a much better chance of getting somewhere. A bunch of coders doing work on a voluntary basis will have a hard time competing with teams of full-time paid engineers.
Color me interested. I'm currently fed up with more or less the entire current crop of browsers, so it would be nice to see a new serious player with some experience enter the field. Old Opera was a fantastic suite in its day, but new Opera is little more than a buggy hack of Chrome.
A new interface which offers less functionality than either Chrome or Opera 12 (it can't even export your bloody bookmarks FFS), constantly locks up and becomes unresponsive for half-minutes or more at a time after simple actions, and largely wastes its breath on visual features like the new bookmarks manager which manage to be deliberately less functional than almost any other possible interface.
I am wondering, how did these guys got that domain name. I think such domains should be used for what they are supposed to - Vivaldi, and not some random beta browser (although it might be pretty good!). Too much hype put in the wrong place these days :(
In most (all?) browsers with a unified search bar, your search query may be confused with a URL and breaks your search. There's usually some syntax you can throw at the front to disambiguate, but I'd rather not have to think about whether my query is going to work or not -- especially with new TLDs rolling out all the time. I much appreciate the separate search bar as a result.
There are two different ways to do this in Firefox with no addons or weird configs:
Open Preferences->Search->One-click Search Engines, make sure google is checked, double-click "google" in the keyword column, change it to just "g".
If you want to keep the old "google" term or outright disable Google as a built-in search engine you can still add "g" as a keyword search. Go to Google, right click the search box, select "Add a Keyword for this Search..." and select "g" as your keyword. This works for search forms on most sites that aren't doing insane stuff with javascript or mandating a security token and it generally remembers other form settings as well.
It looks definitely out of place on Ubuntu (a Gnome fallback desktop here.) It looks like something ported from a Windows 8 desktop and it ignores the system setting for the color of the title bar.
I also wonder why they are implementing an integrated mail client. It seems a waste of developer time which could be spent on something more important.
That said, the browser is pretty fast. Chances that I'll use it: maybe, but not as primary browser. I'm using FF with some vital addons as my primary browser (Firebug, NoScript, AdBlock, SelfDestructingCookies) and Opera/Blink as wordprocessor and spreadsheet on Google Drive, to separate concerns (customer mandated docs). I can't see me leaving FF for this (I didn't for Chrome) but it could end up replacing Opera if they keep it minimal.
Well, I know I'm not your average user, but a website that only displays a spinner to noscript users doesn't exactly make me very confident that this browser will help to make a better www.
When I started to use the web there were campaigns like best viewed in any browser, and the browser wars were just starting. I didn't realize that sharing my sentiment would be perceived as complaining. I know how to disable noscript.
The times had changed. Semantic Web is dead. Nobody anymore gives a damn about that, everyone's drunk the kool-aid of webapps.
Everyone used to hate Flash, but it's perceived as normal when the pages are bundled a good chunk of rendering/layout engine to run inside your browser engine. Can't track you and serve you advertisements with plain hypertext documents, duh.
The issue here is not GP's browsing experience. It's the fact that they failed to address such an elementry UX usecase that should not have occured in the first place; eithrr degrade gracefully or use a noscript tag. This failure is unacceptable if they are the same folks who are working on the web browser, seeing that its UVP is mostly UX.
You have a point, yet, it's somehow fugly that to read text content and a few static images you have to remotely download and execute a piece of software. You have one already.
Not only that, but unnecessarily using JavaScript means higher CPU burn, more memory allocation, and subsequently greater battery depletion. One of these days I'm going to make a database of web site carbon footprints...
It's your software on your machine doing the requests. If you can't control it, this is a really bad omen.
µMatrix/Policeman, do not allow requests to fonts.googleapis.com (IIRC fonts are served as CSSes from this host, but actual font files are served from the other hostname), done.
Instead of noscript, you should just run the javascript, and then if you want to be safe run it again, backwards. That way it's idempotent and can't cause any problems. The downside is that you'll forget everything as you unread it.
As a noscript user myself, seeing a spinner is already quite an achievement. Lots and lots of sites out there - even ones with only static content - appear absolutely blank.
Looks good! I think the first thing you could do with is a public bug tracker/feature request system. I think the forum format is particularly badly suited to managing feature requests and tracking bugs.
One suggestion: 'A new browser for our friends' is nowhere a good introduction. It simply fails to explain to me the reason why I should care this in the first place.
oh for fucks sake it's goddamn node.js again. Stop this shit. I don't need a node runtime taking up 400MB on top of an already memory hungry browser. I don't need a browser using and abusing fucking javascript to run.
>You do realise that node.js is basically just V8 right?
Aside from the fact that I don't need a goddamn 400MB runtime running all the time, the major problem is that node.js (and javascript, by extension) are awful tools for anything desktop related. (Server related too, but that's more a personal opinion that node.js is cancer (hi ted)).
Performance has never been up to par with C/C++ (no, testing a 100 line script is not a valid bench. No, comparing it against awful code is not a valid bench either. Which kinda invalidates 90% of node benchmarks.). But sure, let's trade a bit of performance for ease of use, I'm all for it. Except when that tradeoff implies using javascript, whose warts are known by anyone sensible. Having a single threaded architecture for a browser, which should basically be running one process/thread per tab is an error we shouldn't be doing anymore in 2015. I sure love one tab crashing my entire browser(hi firefox). Which I managed to do quickly with Vivaldi, but I can understand that it's still a beta.
Also, let's ignore the OS's native UI libraries because atom-shell/whatever-desktop-lib-they-use chose to render the entire thing as a DOM because reasons.
>Chrome and FF had a decent amount of memory leaks "despite" being written in C++
Nowhere did I hold Chrome and Firefox in high regards when it comes to memory usage. Chrome seems to think that allocating 4GB of memory for 20ish tabs is a good idea. Firefox is a bit better but has this slight tendency to leak memory like crazy.
tl;dr: browsers suck but that's not a reason to write one in fucking javascript
My guess is that it's funded by Opera Software co-founder and former Jon von Tetzchner for now, he should have some money left in the bank after leaving Opera.
It's roughly the same as Chrome, plus the reference to Vivaldi.
It's ugly, as any user-agent string is. The uglier beast, to my knowledge, is this one:
Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 520) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537
Microsoft is trying to avoid UA-based blocking (e.g. Google once used this do block the Google Maps web app in Windows Phones) and styling (some sites only send the mobile version to webkit mobile browsers). Microsoft effectively masks its browser by changing the UA string to something which is detected as mobile Webkit, and this is (IMHO) wrong. Even if the site is "functional", a site owner should be able to opt to not support Windows Phones.
Suppose you are responsible for a site which carries a heavy and valuable brand. Suppose you don't have/don't want to allocate the resources needed to correctly develop and test your site in Windows Phone. You don't know how the site will run: you won't know about bugs, you can't guarantee a solid user experience and you can't guarantee performance. Ergo, you might affect the brand you carry. Although not ideal, I think it is valid for someone to say "I want to block my site in some device/OS, because I can't guarantee the quality and it might be bad for my brand".
I concede (and believe) that the end user should be able to circumvent these mechanisms by, e.g., changing the UA string. However, I don't agree with Microsoft approach of masquerading, by default, as Android and/or iOS browsers. Pardon my rant, but it's just Microsoft being Microsoft: bending standards at will and playing desperate when not it control of a given market.
"A new browser for our friends", as in the developer community? That seems like a lot of effort to build a browser for a very small group of users.
The sad truth of browsers is that most people use whatever comes on their machine. A lot of times that would be IE - lots of people I know/companies in the UK still use IE out of a lack of knowing any better. Some more savvy users will use Chrome/FF but that's because they realise it has a lot of benefits over IE or are shamed into not using IE.
This doesn't really offer any 'wow' features that entice me as a web developer to try it, so your average user is even less likely to try it. And really, when making a browser, your target needs to be the masses because otherwise no web dev is going to support your browser if it requires even the tiniest of special treatment in their code.
In an interview with digi.no, they speak of feeling abandoned by Opera when they switched to their new chrome version, and that they weren't alone. Maybe that's their friends. Old Opera 12 users.
"A new browser for our friends", as in the developer community?
The "Opera community" is, or was, a thing. Opera spent years cultivating an actual community around their users, with forums and chat and social networking features galore. Then they shut it down last year.
The Vivaldi folks have also started Vivaldi.net, which appears to be an attempt to keep that community going elsewhere now that Opera has essentially axed everything that made people love them in favor of being an also-ran Chromium fork.
Tried it out, there are some problems with handling local hostnames. Tried visiting my localhost webserver but have to specify http:// every time, even if I'm already on the site and just append something to the url it'll redirect me to google unless I first prepend http://. It's rather annoying considering I only edited the already loaded URL. It's easily a deal breaker from a developer stance point.
If it's actively removing the http:// when you type it yourself, yes, I can see that. But then from a developer standpoint it only makes so much sense to develop using a browser with basically zero market share.
Similar things happen in Chrome. This is why I jumped the shark and simply use fake domains with actual TLDs for local development stuff, e.g. "myproject.ninja" or "something.gg". With the advent of all those new TLDs, there should be one for you as well to designate as "this points to localhost". ;-)
I've had similar things happen in Chrome but in no way as intrusive and obnoxious, let say in Chrome if I change an existing url in the urlbar of localhost I'm taken to the correct site and not redirected to the google launch page.
MRU Tab Switching out of the box. Didn't expect that now that some shitty browsers (Chrome) can't even have it via extensions. I will never understand why someone intentionally removed ctrl+tab functionality from their browser (it's completely useless feature as "select tab to the right").
So I'll keep an eye on this for sure. Even though there are lots of missing features and couple of bugs that I noticed right out of the box. I hope they'll get to the point where they can maintain their own version of Blink, to get rid of some stupid choices they made (text selection for example).
I for example. I like the controls matching the state of the screen. It's more predictable that way.
The placement of newly opened tabs / ctrl+opened links is on the other hand something I always find wrong in most browsers. It's seem there's no logic pattern in that.
I couldn't get used to MRU because then I can't get to the tab I want without looking away / breaking my train of thought. Once you know the tab you want is three tabs to the right, you can get to it by muscle memory. You can't build a mental index with MRU because the items keep moving around (but maybe tracking MRU lists is an acquired mental skill).
By default, many browsers also arrange tabs in an order I find not entirely optimal. Tree Style Tabs / Tab Mix Plus help here.
Writing this comment made me go and set up a non-MRU way to switch between windows (7TT has a hidden option for this - no good TWMs on Windows, sadly).
In old Opera you were shown an ordered list of tabs when using ctrl+tab (as you have in window managers). Not exactly what you were talking about, but it was not just random guessing as for which tab will pop up next. You saw how many you had to go, or you could use a mouse. You have other shortcuts for go left/right when those make sense.
Also, my biggest issue is with the inability to change this behavior. So I don't think there is one right way to do things (as there obviously isn't). I think such option should be included in settings, or at least let it be possible via extension (as is in FF). By the way, request for this option is one of the top voted issues in chromium (like in top 10 of all time I think), yet it was closed as WONTFIX without any comment from developers.
Yes, I used Opera for many years until I reluctantly switched to Firefox. The MRU popup still adds a mental load because you have to visually scan the tab list and know at which tab to stop at. Alt+Tab suffers from the same problem.
> or you could use a mouse
I try to not use the mouse, even while browsing the web. One of the reasons I liked Opera was the excellent spatial navigation feature, which sadly has no good equivalent in other browsers currently. Vivaldi claims to reimplement it, so that's interesting, but at this point I'm not going to risk more lock-in by switching from an open-source browser to a closed-source one.
I do (although I guess it's because that's how the browser works currently) - when I hit ctrl tab in FF, I know that the browser will move to the tab to the right, and ctrl shift tab will move left. If I check email, or open a tab to read during the day, and come back to my browser later on, I can't necessarily remember which tabs I used most recently.
I do? My tabs are ordered and I prefer to traverse them in the order I can visualize at the top of the browser. I'd prefer not to keep track of which tab I happened to view last.
+1 for affordances and maintaining the visual order of tabs.
MRU drives me batty. It mostly makes sense for applications (Alt+Tab et al.) but for documents like webpages the "index" is right there in my tab bar. Why expect me to remember the order I last looked at them?
On a related note, Shift+Cmd+[] doesn't work in Vivaldi for tab switching, unlike every other browser on OS X. Dealbreaker for me.
Have you tried to configure it manually? There's an option for previous/next tab shortcut in options menu, but not all key combinations seem to work.
As for your first remark, why not both? MRU is most useful for cycling between two (or similarly low number) tabs. It's not possible with "go right" function. You have (and "always" had) other shortcuts for spatial switching, which makes sense in some situations. So you can (and do) use those. Why remove functionality for key combo that works like that in other environments? Also, you have the "index" right there in your OS as well.
Me, and probably anyone who uses a browser with something closer to ten than ten thousand tabs. I don't keep a list of the last 8 tabs I used in my head.
This is the first feature I immediately felt compelled to change. Tabs are visually represented with a spacial order, and there is nothing to indicate order of access. If I can see the tab I want is two to the left, and I can't remember how many "tabs ago" I viewed it, pressing CTRL+shift+TAB twice is thoughtlessly easy and conceptually simple.
You can remap this functionality, but this particular key combo doesn't seem to work.
By default it was on ctrl+3/4, and I don't think it's a wise choice as ctrl+number is good for either selecting first 10 tabs (chrome, ff), or for opening a speed dial entry (Opera=<12). I would actually like both of these functions, perhaps on alt+number and ctrl+number.
Ctrl-Tab/Ctrl-Shift-Tab (along with other tab management keys like Ctrl-T and Ctrl-W) are nice because you can hit them using only the left hand, with the right hand remaining on the mouse.
I prefer CTRL+TAB and CTRL+shift+TAB because they can be used with one hand moving the hand only slightly from its natural resting position. It also remains essentially identical on almost any keyboard. Neither of these are true for CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN.
I don't remember X tabs back either, but you can't go back and forth between two tabs unless you place them next to each other and then use two separate shortcuts. That's a deal-breaker for me.
I strongly disagree with parts of your post. I just now learned that there is something like "MRU". I've tried to search for a Chrome extension that does it before, without luck. I don't see why they should be mutually exclusive. I use Ctrl+(Shift+)Tab a lot (in addition to Alt+1-9) but would also like to "Go back to the previous tab" using some OTHER keyboard shortcut.
edit: Just tried Vivaldi and they've disabled both of those shortcuts that I use ALL THE TIME. Makes it more or less unusable.
It's nice, but for me only useful if it's combined with the old Opera's "click tab to minimize", so that you can click the active tab to access the previously-used one. That's the feature that made the Opera the tab bar consistent with the behavior of Windows task bar and MDI application bars, which IMHO is great.
I'm downloading Vivaldi now. Chrome's safe-download mechanism doesn't like it.
As much as I like the idea of writing a browser using web technologies, most attempts so far have been pretty lacklustre. I'll wait until it's finished to pass final judgement on Vivaldi, but I don't really want the old Opera UI and features on top of the browser engine that the current Opera uses.
Also, I'm waiting for someone to just make a nice plain web browser. I don't want a mail client built in, I already have one of those. I don't want panels everywhere that I can't hide, nor do I really want a note taker. All I want in a browser is the minimal amount of UI around a fast browser engine that has lots of green boxes on caniuse.com.
Chrome's good (I do use it) but it seems to me that Google is turning it into a platform. It has lots of green boxes, but non-standards track features are creeping in.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadHaving mail built in is not useful for me, but I wonder if it will support other email providers eventually (gmail etc)?
But, just fyi, you can switch off the color changing. At least in this preview release.
I'm assuming this on the basis that they features they are looking to implement were part of the old Opera featureset, which included a mail client.
Edit: Some more info here: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/27/meet-vivaldi-new-brows...
Seems as if it uses the Chrome engine. I wonder about the differences to Opera then.
Edit: Found also this on the homepage (somewhat hidden under the "Web technology" tab):
We use JavaScript and React to create the user interface — with the help of Node.js, Browserify and a long list of NPM modules. Vivaldi is the web built with the web.
So it's like http://breach.cc/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952152) then?
[1]: https://vivaldi.com/#Features/4
There are also a lot of libraries listed that are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is incompatible with the GNU GPL. Distributing this therefore might not actually be legal, regardless of whether or not it's released under a FOSS license, since those two license families have conflicting requirements for derived works (including works which use those libraries).
YMMV, IANAL, etc., but this thing's running the risk of legal technicalities killing it in the crib.
http://otter-browser.org/
It's not as bad as Firefox though.
`g thisissearch.com` would be interpreted as Google search query, not url. I think this is good behaviour.
Open Preferences->Search->One-click Search Engines, make sure google is checked, double-click "google" in the keyword column, change it to just "g".
If you want to keep the old "google" term or outright disable Google as a built-in search engine you can still add "g" as a keyword search. Go to Google, right click the search box, select "Add a Keyword for this Search..." and select "g" as your keyword. This works for search forms on most sites that aren't doing insane stuff with javascript or mandating a security token and it generally remembers other form settings as well.
I also wonder why they are implementing an integrated mail client. It seems a waste of developer time which could be spent on something more important.
That said, the browser is pretty fast. Chances that I'll use it: maybe, but not as primary browser. I'm using FF with some vital addons as my primary browser (Firebug, NoScript, AdBlock, SelfDestructingCookies) and Opera/Blink as wordprocessor and spreadsheet on Google Drive, to separate concerns (customer mandated docs). I can't see me leaving FF for this (I didn't for Chrome) but it could end up replacing Opera if they keep it minimal.
Is this finally a replacement for Opera?
[0] http://i.imgur.com/eqVD5kF.png
Sadly, you can mess yourself up if you go exploring in there, see a slider, wonder what it does and give it a go. On a non-HiDPI display anyway!
Everyone used to hate Flash, but it's perceived as normal when the pages are bundled a good chunk of rendering/layout engine to run inside your browser engine. Can't track you and serve you advertisements with plain hypertext documents, duh.
No need to let your biases leak out when noscri.
Think about a "better web".
µMatrix/Policeman, do not allow requests to fonts.googleapis.com (IIRC fonts are served as CSSes from this host, but actual font files are served from the other hostname), done.
One suggestion: 'A new browser for our friends' is nowhere a good introduction. It simply fails to explain to me the reason why I should care this in the first place.
oh for fucks sake it's goddamn node.js again. Stop this shit. I don't need a node runtime taking up 400MB on top of an already memory hungry browser. I don't need a browser using and abusing fucking javascript to run.
Looks good though, and features seem interesting.
Chrome and FF had a decent amount of memory leaks "despite" being written in C++
Blink-in-JavaScript is a mechanism to enable Blink developers to implement DOM features in JavaScript (instead of C++).
Aside from the fact that I don't need a goddamn 400MB runtime running all the time, the major problem is that node.js (and javascript, by extension) are awful tools for anything desktop related. (Server related too, but that's more a personal opinion that node.js is cancer (hi ted)).
Performance has never been up to par with C/C++ (no, testing a 100 line script is not a valid bench. No, comparing it against awful code is not a valid bench either. Which kinda invalidates 90% of node benchmarks.). But sure, let's trade a bit of performance for ease of use, I'm all for it. Except when that tradeoff implies using javascript, whose warts are known by anyone sensible. Having a single threaded architecture for a browser, which should basically be running one process/thread per tab is an error we shouldn't be doing anymore in 2015. I sure love one tab crashing my entire browser(hi firefox). Which I managed to do quickly with Vivaldi, but I can understand that it's still a beta.
Also, let's ignore the OS's native UI libraries because atom-shell/whatever-desktop-lib-they-use chose to render the entire thing as a DOM because reasons.
>Chrome and FF had a decent amount of memory leaks "despite" being written in C++
Nowhere did I hold Chrome and Firefox in high regards when it comes to memory usage. Chrome seems to think that allocating 4GB of memory for 20ish tabs is a good idea. Firefox is a bit better but has this slight tendency to leak memory like crazy.
tl;dr: browsers suck but that's not a reason to write one in fucking javascript
awaiting the nodejs defense force
Someone is targeting Opera-like experience and damn, I like it.
I am not sure about liking it being another incarnation of Chrome inside though.
So I guess one could say there's a link between Opera and Vivaldi (no pun intended).
I think it's the first useragent string to contain 7 different browser/engine names.
It's ugly, as any user-agent string is. The uglier beast, to my knowledge, is this one:
Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 520) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537
Windows Phone 8.1 Internet Explorer.
The more things you put in your UA string, the harder it'll be to fall into the "this is IE" bucket.
Microsoft is trying to avoid UA-based blocking (e.g. Google once used this do block the Google Maps web app in Windows Phones) and styling (some sites only send the mobile version to webkit mobile browsers). Microsoft effectively masks its browser by changing the UA string to something which is detected as mobile Webkit, and this is (IMHO) wrong. Even if the site is "functional", a site owner should be able to opt to not support Windows Phones.
Suppose you are responsible for a site which carries a heavy and valuable brand. Suppose you don't have/don't want to allocate the resources needed to correctly develop and test your site in Windows Phone. You don't know how the site will run: you won't know about bugs, you can't guarantee a solid user experience and you can't guarantee performance. Ergo, you might affect the brand you carry. Although not ideal, I think it is valid for someone to say "I want to block my site in some device/OS, because I can't guarantee the quality and it might be bad for my brand".
I concede (and believe) that the end user should be able to circumvent these mechanisms by, e.g., changing the UA string. However, I don't agree with Microsoft approach of masquerading, by default, as Android and/or iOS browsers. Pardon my rant, but it's just Microsoft being Microsoft: bending standards at will and playing desperate when not it control of a given market.
The sad truth of browsers is that most people use whatever comes on their machine. A lot of times that would be IE - lots of people I know/companies in the UK still use IE out of a lack of knowing any better. Some more savvy users will use Chrome/FF but that's because they realise it has a lot of benefits over IE or are shamed into not using IE.
This doesn't really offer any 'wow' features that entice me as a web developer to try it, so your average user is even less likely to try it. And really, when making a browser, your target needs to be the masses because otherwise no web dev is going to support your browser if it requires even the tiniest of special treatment in their code.
Clearly not, as statistics show that IE is no longer the most popular browser in any country in Europe.
The "Opera community" is, or was, a thing. Opera spent years cultivating an actual community around their users, with forums and chat and social networking features galore. Then they shut it down last year.
The Vivaldi folks have also started Vivaldi.net, which appears to be an attempt to keep that community going elsewhere now that Opera has essentially axed everything that made people love them in favor of being an also-ran Chromium fork.
The My Opera site was what made people love Opera? Uh... No. Opera 12 had tens of millions of users, and hardly a fraction of those visited that site.
I love the future
Maybe as matures it will introduce it's own rendering features and then your point will have more credence.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local [2]: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6762
So I'll keep an eye on this for sure. Even though there are lots of missing features and couple of bugs that I noticed right out of the box. I hope they'll get to the point where they can maintain their own version of Blink, to get rid of some stupid choices they made (text selection for example).
Relevant (open-source) project: http://otter-browser.org/
Who even finds "select tab to the right" useful??
The placement of newly opened tabs / ctrl+opened links is on the other hand something I always find wrong in most browsers. It's seem there's no logic pattern in that.
By default, many browsers also arrange tabs in an order I find not entirely optimal. Tree Style Tabs / Tab Mix Plus help here.
Also, my biggest issue is with the inability to change this behavior. So I don't think there is one right way to do things (as there obviously isn't). I think such option should be included in settings, or at least let it be possible via extension (as is in FF). By the way, request for this option is one of the top voted issues in chromium (like in top 10 of all time I think), yet it was closed as WONTFIX without any comment from developers.
> or you could use a mouse
I try to not use the mouse, even while browsing the web. One of the reasons I liked Opera was the excellent spatial navigation feature, which sadly has no good equivalent in other browsers currently. Vivaldi claims to reimplement it, so that's interesting, but at this point I'm not going to risk more lock-in by switching from an open-source browser to a closed-source one.
+1 for affordances and maintaining the visual order of tabs.
On a related note, Shift+Cmd+[] doesn't work in Vivaldi for tab switching, unlike every other browser on OS X. Dealbreaker for me.
As for your first remark, why not both? MRU is most useful for cycling between two (or similarly low number) tabs. It's not possible with "go right" function. You have (and "always" had) other shortcuts for spatial switching, which makes sense in some situations. So you can (and do) use those. Why remove functionality for key combo that works like that in other environments? Also, you have the "index" right there in your OS as well.
it's like having random switching
EDIT: Sadly Vivaldi doesn't seem to support CTRL+PGUP / CTRL+PGDN yet.
By default it was on ctrl+3/4, and I don't think it's a wise choice as ctrl+number is good for either selecting first 10 tabs (chrome, ff), or for opening a speed dial entry (Opera=<12). I would actually like both of these functions, perhaps on alt+number and ctrl+number.
edit: Just tried Vivaldi and they've disabled both of those shortcuts that I use ALL THE TIME. Makes it more or less unusable.
As is Chrome for me because they disabled ctrl+tab :)
Either way, I think we can agree, that shortcuts should be something that user can configure.
* Why not by default ?
* Why is Ctrl+Shift+Tab and Ctrl+Tab working in reverse? Even when I change my preference to "tab order".
* It's not customizable enough, I want something that works like Tree Style Tab.
As much as I like the idea of writing a browser using web technologies, most attempts so far have been pretty lacklustre. I'll wait until it's finished to pass final judgement on Vivaldi, but I don't really want the old Opera UI and features on top of the browser engine that the current Opera uses.
Also, I'm waiting for someone to just make a nice plain web browser. I don't want a mail client built in, I already have one of those. I don't want panels everywhere that I can't hide, nor do I really want a note taker. All I want in a browser is the minimal amount of UI around a fast browser engine that has lots of green boxes on caniuse.com.
[0]- http://surf.suckless.org/