So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That's cute, but its not a new browser.
It's the same browser with a slightly new UI.
Count me as skeptical and unexcited.
I am similarly unexcited by the 'it's browser' webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they're dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use.
(Servo, by comparison, is a new rendering engine, with new features that make it extremely interesting)
Doing HTML and JavaScript are commodities. Given the existence of standards, there's not a lot of room for innovative behavior. Any developments (faster, new HTML standards, etc) won't impact the market unless they're in one of the major browsers. Competition is good, but there's only room in the market for a handful of rendering engines. Maybe 3-5, tops.
Conversely, UI and human interaction with the browser is a place where there's room for an unbounded number of players. This is where the competition can actually be happening. And it's where I think the competition should be happening.
The idea of a browser as something that just renders HTML and executes JavaScript is kinda lame. I use Opera because I think it's also the browser's responsibility to include tab organization and search functionality and mouse gestures and flipping CSS in and out and synchronization. (And I like my mail integrated, but that's a personal thing.) And I want it to Just Work, instead of having to manage a half-dozen extensions.
I am guardedly optimistic about Vivaldi, because it's what I actually out of a browser. (Specifically, an updated version of Opera 12, which Opera 15+ is not.)
> Given the existence of standards, there's not a lot of
> room for innovative behavior.
This is incorrect. Servo, with its goal of being fanatically concurrent, is forging new ground in discovering exactly where the HTML specs both admit concurrency and where they unintentionally demand serial behavior. Browsers of its ilk, regardless of adoption, will be instrumental in informing future standards such that they are not accidentally hostile to concurrency and parallelism, thereby clearing the way for widely-adopted engines to implement such optimizations at their leisure.
Servo is a research project for a future version of Firefox. That's the definition of a major browser. No web developers want a new browser with incompatible features to test or build against, but Mozilla/Google/Microsoft experimenting for future versions is expected.
The original point is that independent browsers using established libraries and adding new UI concepts is great for users and doesn't make extra work for web developers. I'm looking forward to what they make of it!
Because they are using some proprietary technology that is only available in Google Chrome. It will probably take time for Mozilla to adapt this... When Google announced Inbox, they said it would be later adapted to work with other browsers. I guess it is not on the top of their agenda.
Funny, i just went to Google.com with Firefox. I see no messages. I also went to Google.com with Safari, and saw a message that said "A faster way to browse the web! Install Google Chrome"
I suspect a "This site only works with chrome!" message only applies to older versions of Internet Explorer.
Crying wolf is so boring these days.
edit: Also i find it hilarious that you think Google would risk rejecting all users who aren't using Chrome. Talk about a great way to give your Search competition a legitimate case.
edit2: The downvoting is cute, and i hope it's because of my tone and not me calling out lies. "Anything but Chrome!" he says - absurd. By all means, downvote my tone, but i should hope outright lying gets similar treatment.
> Funny, i just went to Google.com with Firefox. I see no messages.
I see it often on Firefox, I have the latest Firefox on linux (35.0.1). It's a blue bar along the top of many Google properties that are decently cross browser. Go to Inbox without chrome and you'll see the "only works with chrome" crap.
The biggest difference is probably NaCl in Chrome right now.
Thank you. As long as it works, I don't care which rendering engine my browser uses, just as I don't care which libc implementation it uses. The browser is the UI, not the libraries it links to.
There is a lot of room for innovative algorithms for providing those standards. And innovation of that type is exactly what is needed to take the web to the next step - so I applaud any team who tries to build new browsers!
As a user, a different UI is a more compelling reason to switch than a new engine, as long as the "old, boring" engine performs well enough. I miss the Opera UI of the olden days, but Chrome's engine works just fine for me (memory usage is a bit annoying, but tolerable)
(Not saying that it isn't important that people work on new, different engines as well in the long run)
I think both UI/UX and engines are both valid to work on. Since the work on this one example is done on UI, I'd feel better if I knew how the UI looks like (without having to install it).
I suppose you think every video game made using the Unreal Engine is basically the same game too, right? I can understand the disappointment that they're not creating a new JS or rendering engine, especially from a community like HN that is so technical, but it's absurd to state that this thing is not a new browser simply because it uses these existing technologies. How much end-user functionality really comes from a JS or rendering engine when it's adhering to the same standards that every other competing engine is?
I was likewise hoping that if this new browser used Servo. When I got to the part that said it would be fast, and efficient, and run on old hardware, I thought that Servo would do a good job of that—it has none of the cruft that <WebKit|Gecko|Blink> has.
But then I saw the part that said the browser's UI was Built on Web Technology, and then I read your comment, and my dreams were crushed forever.
Disappointing.
Seriously, I can't understand how they expect this to be any faster when everything on the homepage (which is still mostly content-free) says otherwise.
Netcaptor that invented tabbed browsing didn't have a custom new rendering engine either.
It looks like this browser is a continuation of classic Opera, which pioneered a lot of stuff we take for granted today:
- Speed Dial — the start page you get in every browser these days
- mail client with filtered views, later known as "folders like in GMail"
- page modifications with user-supplied JS and CSS (later known as Greasemonkey and basis for browser extensions, which ironically Opera didn't have for a long time)
- address bar history based on full-text search of visited pages
- bookmark sync across devices
- pages rendered by a proxy server (like Amazon Silk browser)
And they've tried plenty of things that didn't catch on: built-in Torrent client, built-in web server (like node.js) and Widgets.
To each their own, but I couldn't care less about the engine to be honest.
I have like 20 reasons why I miss the old Opera and I currently don't have any browser I feel comfortable with. All of them have to do with the UI. None has to do with the engine.
A re-made Firefox in Rust could be not just much faster but also much more secure, even than Chrome, if combining Rust's safety features with Electrosis/a similar sandbox and multiprocess system.
This new browser isn't just replacing Chrome's images with its own. It has new UI code, apparently using web standards. In other words, it's about as far from a skin as you can get.
When you replace images it's a skin. When you write code it isn't - it's a new UI.
You sir, do not build things for browsers. It made me so incredibly happy that their goal was to innovate more for the experience of the every day end-user rather than toss yet another set of vendor prefixes.
Anyway, I think the TL;DR here is, "A new browser for our friends". To me, this implies they're building a new browser for the everyman, not a bunch of curmudgeon-y developers on HackerNews.
People outside of HN couldn't care less about new JS / rendering engines. They want to Google things, check their email / InstaTwitterVineBooks and generally just kinda meander around the web. To that person, new interface features is really the only thing they see. Honestly this is kinda refreshing to see in a weird way.
Not disagreeing with you, but some browsers on iOS do add useful features even while being webkit skins, for example Mercury Browser on iOS supports adblock lists, which Safari doesn't.
Looks like it's likely based on node-webkit / nwjs / atom - dead give away is rounded bottom corners and sharp top corners, a long standing issue for that project.
Yeah, BTW I am also super curious how they merged the tabs UI with the top window bar. That also seems to be a pending issue in atom. I have a feeling it may just be nwjs.
Personally, I don't care about new engines as much as I care about having a good browser that is not controlled by Google. We need more competitors in this space.
You say that, but look what Google has stumbled onto trying this path on iOS.
Chrome on iOS is rubbish.
...because the Chrome guys are daft? Nope. ...because it's Apple's playground, and they don't want to play, so they've deliberately ('not deliberately') made it so anyone using their engine is a 2nd class citizen, and can only build a poor user experience.
What makes it rubbish? I remember using it when it was released and I switched to it as my main browser instantly. At the time I felt it was better than Safari, if not only for the top bar being smaller and/or hidden, something Safari did not do at the time. It also had the "request desktop" which is invaluable at times.
Currently I use Safari but it's because I haven't bothered since I use the iPhone browser for almost nothing.
its much much slower. scrolling down a page often chokes. changing tabs can take 5 or 6 seconds to re-render. I might have low disk space issues on my iPad, but Safari performs flawlessly.
and its not Chrome's fault. Apple do not allow any other web browser on iOS, so Chrome is just WebKit except you don't get the same javascript engine as Safari does.
I stubbornly continue to use it because I want my history and bookmarks to match my desktop.
I also use my devices jailbroken, and there are fixes for the Javascript engine. That being said, I mostly used it without them, and even when I did I noticed no difference. Again, probably because I use the iOS browsers very little.
>>> .because it's Apple's playground, and they don't want to play
This is very similar to what Windows Phone is doing as well. You can't download FF or Chrome on their phones, just other poor IE clones. Granted, IE has come a long way and is pretty decent on Windows Phone, but if I could use one browser across all my devices, I'd be a bit happier.
After some more looking around, it seems it was a mutal decision.
Windows started the war when they locked out native third-party code development on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Then in subsequent findings, Chrome lamented they can't get enough privileges with Metro app development to make it work and Mozilla knows MS doesn't want to further their platform - so a sort of stalemate at this point, and a loss to Windows Phone users.
Sources:
Mozilla: No plans to release Firefox for Windows Phone 7 (March 2010)
Essentially, yes. To elaborate on the linked bug a bit:
You can use UIWebView, the older interface. The biggest problem is that its JavaScript engine is slower than Safari's, and does not JIT compile code (according to Apple, this is for security reasons). I've also seen complaints about scrolling performance.
You can use WKWebView, the newer interface. Its JavaScript engine does JIT, and it boasts 60fps scrolling. Unfortunately, it's missing several features detailed in the bug, including a way to clear and manage cookies, custom URL handlers, POST request bodies missing in certain cases, etc.
One would hope that the WkWebView bugs and omissions will be addressed in future iOS versions, but today is not possible to make an iOS browser that works as well as Safari.
Last I checked, iOS's third-party app policies forbid the implementation of anything akin to a JIT compiler, and even third-party usage of the standard WebView component disables the Nitro JIT. I'm not an iOS dev though, I have no idea if there's been any progress in this space recently.
To be precise, it's not that JIT is now allowed in iOS; that would be a security issue because it would basically allow sandboxed apps to create executable memory area, which is considered very bad. On the contrary, what just happens is that WKWebView is piggy-backing on the new extension system to run in a different process, with a different relaxed sandbox,
and communicates to the host app with an IPC channel (similar to eg. Chrome extensions). It looks like there are not enough features exposed over this IPC channel to make a fully featured browser, yet.
Sounds like an Apple problem. My current solution to that is to ignore iOS completely. If I really wanted/needed to use iOS, I'd suck it up and use a slightly less performant browser or just use the default browser.
I dunno — to a fair extent Blink is still controlled by Google. Yes, Opera are now doing a fair bit of work, but if Google walked away there would no longer be nearly enough the resources to keep up the pace of development.
A good blink/webkit-browser with the ability to self host sync services for it would go a long way. I think the new opera has that, but it's bad for other reasons..
I disagree. We have plenty of competitors in web browsing area: Chrome, Comodo, Epic, Epiphany, Firefox, IE, K-Meleon, Konqueror, Maxthon, Midori, Otter, QupZilla, Sleipnir, SeaMonkey, and now Spartan and Vivaldi. Why don't they contribute to any established open source project rather than create yet another closed source web browser?
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).
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
7. Without limiting the foregoing, you are neither allowed to (a) adapt, alter, translate, embed into any other product or otherwise create derivative works of, or otherwise modify the Software ; (b) separate the component programs of the Software for use on different computers; (c) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software, except as permitted by applicable law;"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The very first thing I noticed as soon as I opened the browser is that the tabs don't touch the top of the screen when the browser is maximized [1]. This makes closing tabs much more difficult since you can't just move your mouse all the way to the top of the screen and middle click--you have to consciously stop moving the mouse before it leaves the tab.
I can understand why they don't touch the top of the screen: the tab stacking shows up above the tab. My suggestion would be to expand the tab to the top of the window, and then just make the tab stacking show up inside at the top of the tab. If not that, at least make the tab's bounding box touch the edge of the screen and leave the tab stacking on top of it.
I found a few more issues while typing this up:
1. The browser seemed to think my CTRL key was stuck or something. Typing in my password on imgur made it switch tabs and zoom out multiple times when I went to type some of the numbers in my password.
2. Copying the image URL from the address bar after I uploaded it didn't copy the protocol. The protocol was hidden since it's http, but that adds an extra step of typing "http://" when I wanted to paste it here.
The browser looks like it has promise. I like the look-and-feel. I like that the address bar is the progress bar when the page is loading. Being able to add notes and screenshots also seems like it would be incredibly useful.
Overall, I'd give the browser another shot once you've made some more progress.
I'm still of the opinion that the space at the top makes sense. I sometimes drag windows to the top to maximize, and like the inverse operation of dragging from the top to restore -- behaves consistently like any other regular Windows application that doesn't mess around with their titlebars.
While Fitts' law is useful, that behaviour actually drives me mad as someone who is used to the three mouse buttons having discrete behaviours on the actual caption bar. Suddenly 'tab' is above 'window' in the hierarchy for control.
I can understand that. For me, though, I use middle click to close tabs significantly more often than I move the browser window to another monitor. So I'd rather live with having to click an empty space farther to the right of the tabs when I actually do move the window.
I could learn to use CTRL+F4 to close tabs, but I find that slower than just middle clicking the tabs.
I can't stand custom drawn windows because they break standards that have been in place on the OS for ages. I submitted a request to Vivaldi to please give us an option for a native window that shows the full window title area instead of custom drawing the window.
I doubt that they're going to offer an alternative mode because the developers seem more concerned with making their own custom behavior instead of just fitting in with my OS. They did a lot of work to break the functionality of a native window.
I wish this trend would end. The few applications I tried out that advertised being built on web technologies were not very well integrated with the OS (UX wise), huge in binary size, very memory hungry and noticeably slower than native alternatives. It's not a selling point, imo.
Especially not when you consider how big a dependency webkit/gecko is and how much bugs and attack surface you're bringing in and are responsible for patching in your end product.
I'm so glad that I'm not the only one asking for this.
I don't understand what the use-case is. Why expend all that energy to make a custom native UI platform when all you end up doing is breaking the standards for my native OS? On Windows, Internet Explorer is the only browser that just gives a simple native window. Chrome and Firefox both cause issues because of their custom drawn windows. I don't see any reason to use Vivaldi if they're going to follow the same path.
All I want is Spatial Navigation like in the old Opera. It was such a intuitive way to operate your browser solely with your keyboard. I really miss the old Opera...
I really like it! One thing that I'd like is for Bookmarks to be synced with Pinboard. Local browser bookmarks are no use for me (and I would presume a lot of people) because I use too many devices and too many browsers. I don't mind going to pinboard.in to view my bookmarks but it's nice to be able to quickly bookmark something using the native browser UI (rather than an extension).
I hope they make it, sure looks interesting. I kinda miss old-Opera, it was great for its time.
I wonder what their business model is. How does one earn money off a browser nowadays? They seem to focus on being a complete browser suite, old-Opera style. Do they plan to sell it as an app? Sell web services (mail etc)? Convert all encountered amazon links into affiliate links? (har har)
My gods, it looks more like Opera12 than the latest Chropera. I'm so very tempted to start using this as a daily driver right away!
And I got an error when trying to register on their forums (edit: solved through IRC), oh well. I wonder if they even considered doing something similar to now-defunct Opera Unite. That thing rocked.
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
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.
- design layout looks cluttered. coloring of the ui to match the website is not a good idea. you cant really distinguish between browser and website, gives me a cluttered feeling.
- ui feels slow and flickering after some clicks
- double click on yosemite doesnt maximize instead it mimizes the window
- dont know why a modern browser needs todos, mail, notes and contacts. we have apps/webapps for that already.
- dont fetch stuff from google servers on startup
- tab grouping is useless for me, split screen etc. would be more useful imo
- integrate a service for bookmarks or deliver an api. local bookmarks are so 1995.
- rename it, vivaldi sounds very oldish and boring.
511 points on HTML5Test [0] on Linux with Vivaldi. That's more than I get with Chromium (481) or Firefox (449). Vivaldi feels already quite nice but not finished (e.g. flickering of the preview images in vertical tabs when switching the tabs) and generally a tiny bit slower when changing tabs in comparison to chrome/chromium, my default browser at the moment.
Definitely keep it installed for now, probably won't use it daily.
So good to see the single character keyboard shortcuts from the old Opera, although some functionality is working differently, need to press 1 and 2 twice to switch back and forth? It used to be that 1 and 2 would go to next and prev tab, but now 3 and 4 seem to have been assigned for those.
1 (cycles bt. tabs?), 2, 3 (next tab), 4 (prev tab), z (back), x (forward)
I have been using this browser for the last 4-5 hours. It is fairly good. However, some pages like Dr. Dobbs and Vivaldi's own forum makes all shortcuts fail. The only solution seems to be to alt-tab to some other window and then use the shortcut. That said, the browser is really neat to use.
I really like the way they've implemented tab previews. I can hover at over the tab and it'll show its thumbnail or I can drag the menubar down under the tab bar and all the tab thumbnails show at once. It makes more sense to me than the way Apple implements it in Safari.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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).
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.
UI should be minimal. I dont't understand why all this buttons, dashboard should be visible by default. It looks like kids picture book, distractions everywhere.
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.
Aside from being draggable, the little gap gives an important visual clue, it spells out the hierarchy between window>tabs. I would guess that user testing backs this up, i.e. people are probably worse at completing tasks like "Move tab X from window A to window B" when the gap is removed.
I'm looking at chrome with a title bar full of tabs. If I want to move the whole browser I have several places to grab the title bar. Additionally, from a sample size of one I find that selecting tabs happens with a far greater frequency than moving the window. Generally the widow is maximized on one display and I simply Alt-Tab to other windows.
Yeah, exactly. There's normally a bit of free space to the right of tabs. User can grab the title bar there. I'm switching between tabs like 1000 times more often than dragging the entire window anywhere. Perhaps I'm not a typical web browser user, but...
If they're able to attract market share at all, there's a lot of money to be made in the default search engine arena. The Mozilla Foundation gets quite a bit of money from Yahoo to have Yahoo be the default.
I downloaded it without any expectations, and I must say I'm impressed. It even runs our Chrome only single page app very well and fast. I'm looking forward to seeing where this one goes.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Its not a new rendering engine.
So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That's cute, but its not a new browser.
It's the same browser with a slightly new UI.
Count me as skeptical and unexcited.
I am similarly unexcited by the 'it's browser' webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they're dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use.
(Servo, by comparison, is a new rendering engine, with new features that make it extremely interesting)