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Vivaldi, the new Web browser for power users
TaoPhoenix:
Aren't the vast majority of power users hooked on add-ons? How will they switch to a new browser? I honestly can't, without at least 8 add-ons I consider must-have also making the jump.
-eleman (March 09, 2015, 08:41 AM)
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I second this.
TaoPhoenix:
I use Opera mainly because it is faster than the others - ALL the others (at least on my box...). The switch to using the webkit engine (and webkit IS just an engine) wasn't what bothered me, it was the dumbing-down trend I'd seen in other browsers. When I was a Firefox fan, I thought the "Firefox button" was a good idea (all the menus, 10% of the space!) but then they took that away and left me with a hamburger and a box of pictures. :-\
Opera went the same way, taking away many of the old Opera's features, and axing a bunch of fairly serious configurability (really? no way to change the default search engine? seriously?) and I usually blamed it on the switch to webkit, though I am now beginning to think that was on purpose.
I have tried Vivaldi, and it really does look like they're trying to bring back the old Opera, even starting a browser-centered community-driven site (Vivaldi.net) that has email, blogging, forums, etc. (MyOpera, anyone?).
As it stands, Vivaldi starts up rather slow for me, and it has that weird Metro square-iness look that is REALLY out of place on my Linux box, but so far, it's... OK. Not as fast as Opera, but it renders some stuff better, and I'm looking forward to seeing what improvements are waiting in the future. For now though, it's an also-ran that I'll keep my eye on.
-Edvard (March 09, 2015, 08:37 PM)
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Well, philosophy wise it looks like this gang is also grumpy with where Opera went, and this looks "almost like a fork". So that FF button is almost exactly what I'd want.
But there's a bunch of business issues here - they have to convince people they have deep enough funding to hold onto this because I think I recall some of old Opera senior management deciding Presto was too expensive to maintain. So this is interesting - just borrow the Blink backend, and then just stay on the UI side.
But I'm most alerted to the possibility this is just a "cool five year mission" that then gets discontinued ... after three years because of external forces.
Gwen7:
this sounds a lot like the old netscape versus internet explorer battle. you could pick a browsing suite that did everything. or get a stand alone browser that was lean and faster. firefox gave us the best of both worlds with their plug-ins. you could start lean. and then junk things up the way you wanted based on how *you* used it. but the real difference is the rendering engines anyway. vivaldi is yet another blink browser without presto. and microsoft's spartan is starting to look interesting now that they've gotten away from their old way of doing things. they also built a supposedly decent new engine to replace trident. and you know their integration with windows will be second to none.
i tried vivaldi for a few days since part of my job is vetting desktop software for the company i work for. i think it's ok as far as it goes. better than a bulked-up firefox if you don't need the plug-ins. but i think vivaldi is too much old-think in trying to do everything. and the vivaldi developers make a lot of assumptions about how people want to do things. opera did that too. so like opera, vivaldi may be a winner. but mostly for people who match the user profile the developers are coding for.
i think it's worth trying to see if its for you. i'm going to stick with firefox for now. :-)
MilesAhead:
I'm trying the x64 version in a W7 x64 VM. So far it refuses to do the ordinary expected things. Like increasing font size with Control NumPad Plus. Also I can't move the window with the mouse. Pretty weird. It has this extended glass area where the caption would be and below it a gray caption bar with the usual min/max/close buttons.
It seems too freaky to try. Being in a VM on a Laptop it's going to be unsmooth. But it still feels weird even so. :)
allen:
I'm trying the x64 version in a W7 x64 VM. So far it refuses to do the ordinary expected things. Like increasing font size with Control NumPad Plus. Also I can't move the window with the mouse. Pretty weird. It has this extended glass area where the caption would be and below it a gray caption bar with the usual min/max/close buttons.
It seems too freaky to try. Being in a VM on a Laptop it's going to be unsmooth. But it still feels weird even so. :)
-MilesAhead (March 13, 2015, 01:51 PM)
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Keep in mind also, the 64 bit version is listed as "experimental"... yeehaw!
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