justthinkit writes:
Vivaldi is billing itself as the power user's browser, and Ars went hands-on with it today. They say, "Vivaldi has so many great features, but it can be a little frustrating because it is still very much a technical preview. It's been largely stable during testing (most of the bugs we encountered using the first release are gone in the second), but it's still missing some key features." It appears to have the cred, with Vivaldi's CEO being Jon S. von Tetzchner, the co-founder and former CEO of Opera. Does the thinking behind Vivaldi appeal to you? Do you plan to switch when it's more feature-complete?
Here I iz
By Ol Olsoc
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2015-Mar-6 18:38
• Score: 5, Informative
• Thread
Okay, I've downloaded and installed Vivaldi, and am taking it for a test drive.
Initial thoughts. Faster than Safari. Incredibly faster than Firefox, which has become like the retired Athlete that put on 100 pounds in 3 months and can't keep up.
Lets you see what cookies are placed on your machine.
Nice Keyboard Shortcuts Youtube runs well, the browser does a weird expanding thing when going to full screen, but works fine once there (it's no slower to get there, so it was just a surprise, not a knock. Configurable tabs
They have a "mail" sidebar. Not certain if web or standard - not implemented yet.
Notes are kinda cool
Things needed:
Cache location and ability to set size needed, plus ability to run with no cache.
I want to know the high persistence cookies and where they get stored, plus the ability to dump and/or refuse them.
This was all with a 15 minute tour. I'm posting using Vivaldi at the moment. It's definitely in preview form, but pretty interesting.
Re:Not even slightly interested
By wile_e_wonka
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2015-Mar-6 18:43
• Score: 5, Informative
• Thread
The problem is that "your chosen extensions" can cause worse bloat than an unused feature in a browser. I'd rather have as much functionality as I can from the developer of the browser itself. Extensions are helpful (particularly for obscure features that no browser developer would bother writing because the user base would be too small) but all to often they break more than they fix.
Basically, the Vivaldi browser is designed to appeal to people who miss Opera 12.x. When Opera moved to Chromium in version 15, it did basically what you are talking about--stripped out nearly every feature aside from browsing itself and it opened up to Chrome extensions. But, many of us found that, in order to add extensions to Opera 15 and later, that met the features we used from 12.x, the browser was a hulking mess--and the extensions for the most part don't work as well as the built in functionality from 12.x. And the whole thing was now slower and riddled with memory leaks due to the extensions.
So, basically, I'm not going to suggest that you must switch to Vivaldi, but personally, I am keeping my eye on the project. I think there is a good user base to be had out there for it.
Cognitive load
By Okian Warrior
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2015-Mar-6 19:35
• Score: 3
• Thread
One thing that Mozilla doesn't get (and engineers in general, I ween) is that changing things imposes a cognitive load on the users.
I'm used to Firefox, it does what I want and doesn't require my attention very much. The major reason I don't switch to Chrome or any of the other browsers is cognitive load: I'd have to learn an entire new way of doing things. Different looks, different icons, different behaviour... it would take hours to figure out the new system, many minor "how can I get it to do this..." moments amortized over the next year.
Every time Firefox changes, it's a distraction. Something to notice, figure out, and get around. For me this time it's the offline cache system - no amount of fiddling with the options or about:config will cause the system to save tabs on program exit and load those tabs anew on start - the weather *has* to show yesterday's page on program startup(*).
The previous issue (for me) was putting the window rendering in an external thread, the upshot was that cascading menus took several seconds to render. Click, count to three, then see the bookmarks... move the cursor, count to three, see the selection bar move down. Setting the about:config option to undo this caused Firefox to crash on every boot, but un-setting "use hardware acceleration" fixed that. (My dad is *totally* going to figure that out and not move to Chrome instead.)
All this "OMGWTF we need to be like Chrome!!!" and "OMGWTF we need a chicklet interface" is driving users away from the system. For every change, a number of users say "screw it, I'm moving to $OtherBrowser".
Changing behaviour at all is stupid, doing it once a month is ridiculously stupid. They're thinking in terms of "how can we add more functionality" instead of "how can we attract and keep users".
Pro tip: adding complexity to every little feature does not necessarily make your software more popular.
(*) To be fair, I've only tried 6 of the 64 possible combinations of options that might affect this (in Options->Privacy and about:config). It might be a simple fix, I just need to uncover the right combination of options to do it.
Re:Looks like Windows 3
By hairyfeet
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2015-Mar-6 19:36
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
So now its wrong to want a UI that doesn't look like the dev took a Clevland Steamer on my screen? From the bottom of my heart fuck you, fuck the hipster douchebags that thought the shitastic fucking 90s was "retro cool" and so are trying their fucking damnedest to recreate Windows God Damned 2.0, the shitiest fucking tablets and Worst Buy special laptops have 200 times the power Windows 2.0 ran on so its more "how low can ya go?" dev circle jerking, and most of all it shows the devs (and anybody who supports that shit) is fucking ignorant because things like raised borders SERVE A PURPOSE, they show you what is clickable and what isn't. Wanna see what this shit flat shaded UI gets you? Yeah go look at Windows Mist8ke and see how quick that shit died,l you couldn't tell foreground from back, icon from picture, Windows 2.0 had better separation of elements!
So you can take that shit and shove it between your collection of Captain Planet and Power Rangers DVDs, the early 90s are NOT retro cool and eye sore flat shaded bullshit is not now, nor will it ever fucking be, popular!
With unencrypted passwords? :)
By saikou
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2015-Mar-6 21:14
• Score: 3
• Thread
I mean yes, it's a browser for "friends", and friends won't try to steal each other's password, but would it kill them to actually encrypt locally stored credentials?
~/.config/vivaldi/Default/Login Data
Plain text for such storage is kinda silly.
https://vivaldi.net/forum/private-browsing/1405-passwords-are-unencrypted
https://github.com/mortenoir/vivaldi-stealer