If you miss the old Opera, the Opera of the Opera 12-era, then Vivaldi is for you. And if the current crop of browsers leaves you wanting more or you end up installing a dozen extensions to get things the way you like them, Vivaldi is well worth a look. But even if you never use this new browser directly, Vivaldi looks to have enough innovative new features that it’s very likely some will end up in whatever browser you do use.
Vivaldi has certainly piqued my interest – especially since I’m having major issues with browsers on OS X. I prefer Chrome on Windows, but Chrome on OS X is far too resource-intensive and sucks tons of battery. Safari for OS X is very buggy for me (nine out of ten times it will refuse to load pages after waking from sleep, forcing you to restart the browser) and I’m experiencing a ton of bugs with YouTube in Safari.
So, I’m looking for a browser that I like on both Windows and OS X, and reading all the positive reports about Vivaldi, it’s definitely worth a look.
I like it. I’d love it if it had Firefox’s tab groups.
I really like tab groups – enough to put up with FF’s poor performance.
What’s the difference between Fx’s tab groups and Vivaldi’s tab stacks?
Well, the most important difference is with tab groups, the only tabs visible are those in the active group. I might have a group of a dozen tabs open and saved that all relate to a project I’m working on, but in the evening, when all I want to do is check up on hockey scores and read Web comics, they’re hidden and out of the way. A quick ctrl+shft+E and all the tabs zoom out, showing me how the tabs are grouped and their thumbnails.
My screen is fairly low resolution, so the space on the tab bar is valuable. Tab stacks occupy that space, even if I’m not actively using them.
Oh, okay, thanks. Haven’t used Firefox in years, but it actually sounds like a better idea than stacks. You might want to pitch it to the Vivaldi team, they really seem to listen to user requests.
What? Firefox doesn’t even have tab groups anymore (unfortunately)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal
The function is still available in an extension (named “Tab Groups”). I’m currently using it, and don’t notice any difference from the old (removed) behavior.
They moved it into an unbundled extension, which is essentially the exact same code as it was when bundled with the browser. It works exactly the same, and I wish they’d start doing this with more features, namely pocket
With Vivaldi, I would expect many things to be Baroque.
They should make it change the skin with every season.
Too bad its just another Chromium/Chrome skin. And it manages to be slower and more bloated than Chrome or Opera on top of being closed sourced, sigh.
http://www.vivaldi.com/source
I stand corrected on that point.
It’s no chromium derivate. It uses Blink but it’s not chromium-based.
…but right now it isn’t even comparable to Opera from a decade earlier.
It says something about the stripped down state of most browsers that Vivaldi is being hyped for customisation craving “power users”, when really it’s still pretty limited. It’s certainly funny seeing them talk about its “innovative new features” when most of them are watered down versions of feature Opera had years ago.
It almost completely lacks the easy UI customisation of Opera – where adding/moving buttons and toolbars, or even changing the content of menus, was trivial to do. Unlike in Vivaldi, there was no need to edit CSS to get the layout you wanted.
Most of the features that I really loved in Opera are still either missing or comparatively limited and inflexible. For example, being able to split two tabs within a window vs. full MDI window management.
In Vivaldi it isn’t even possible to resize tiled Windows, while Opera let you tile tabs how you wanted from the very first version. Opera also had “follower tabs” – a useful feature that display links clicked in one tab in another tiled next to it.
One of my favourite Opera features was its windows panel, which provided a filterable tree of tabs that could be selected and manipulated in groups. Opera was almost certainly the first browser to implement a powerful tab management feature like that (back in 2003, before Firefox 1.0 was even released), and Vivaldi’s simplistic tab grouping doesn’t compare.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see Vivaldi and I hope it’s successful. I’ll be watching to see how it develops and keeping my fingers crossed that it eventually does compare with Opera <=12. But right now, as someone who does still miss the old Opera, the current state of Vivaldi doesn’t impress me much.
I see people hyping it as the answer to the prayers of old Opera fans and I don’t really get it – in some ways Firefox + extensions can provide more of what Opera 12 offered.
Alot of those things are just by virtue of it being version 1.0 (Well, 1.1 now).
Basically, they created a list of all the things they wanted, and some of the things (Re-arrangable buttons ont he toolbar) ended up not ranking very high.
MDI differences, though, is harder when you’re building the interface via javascript, and can’t take advantage of the native, underlying MDI-helper stuff.
The main thing, though, is that Vivaldi is heading towards what the old Opera was, while Opera is moving away.
That’s the thing to keep in mind
That’s why I’ll keep on following its development, although to a large extend I’m just finding it a depressing reminder of how unique and brilliant old Opera was.
I don’t known if there’s a way to do it on Firefox, for the Vivaldi sidebar, if you put a page on it, when you display it, it requests the mobile version of the site, and the mobile version occupies only a small portion of us page, which is actually pretty useful.
There is kinda of a workaround in firefox for this:
1. Bookmark Page
2. right-click on bookmarked page and select properties
3. select “load this bookmark in sidebar”
Ta-daaaa
Also, there is an extension in Firefox called tiled tabs, while it is not what you asked for directly I use it on larger screens to compare things or to leave a video playing.
I remember having to hack an ‘opera6.ini’ file to get a lot of shit configured just the way I wanted it though. Personally, I never liked Opera. It was very configurable to be sure, but not as user-friendly as it should’ve been.
Plus, it REALLY irked me when they completely broke the text to speech feature at some point, and ignored user inquiries about it on their forums. Not even a ‘Sorry, that feature is no longer supported’ response.
Edited 2016-04-29 02:30 UTC
It wasn’t a feature I used, but I remember the anger over it, and the shoddy way that Opera dealt with it. In hindsight that was perhaps a sign of things to come with the browser.
Good luck getting any recent browser to run on CentOS 6 (which still has 4 years of support left):
* Vivaldi’s RPM doesn’t check libstdc++ versions, so happily installs on C6 with no warnings. You can’t actually run it though (three fatal errors).
* Firefox 46 just moved to GTK+3, completely breaking it on C6 (which only has GTK+2). Yes, I know about Firefox ESR, but that’s not what the general public uses.
* Google Chrome requires a later libstdc++ than C6 has (though I have a script to fix this at http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/ in case you’re interested) and doesn’t run out of the box.
* Opera 36 requires libnotify.so.4, which doesn’t exist on C6.
It’s no wonder I was forced to move to CentOS 7 at the beginning of the year – they’d never do this for any supported Windows release!
CentOS isn’t intended for mainstream desktop use. It is primarily a server distro. It can also also be applied to desktops if you are willing to accept stability over convenience.
The general public does not generally use CentOS aside from people normally expects to be aware of ESR releases.
Have a look at Palemoon browser.
On Windows, you would have twenty different Visual C++ DLLs clogging up your system directory.
That’s the trade-off – you can have a system that prizes compatability at the cost of bloat, or one that is leaner, but leaves you in a continual arms race of dependency versions.
It does amuse me when Torvalds rants at devs for unnecessarily breaking compatability, when Linux seems to be riddled with necessary ones.
The web browser is just chromium with a butch plugins.
How about a browser that stops supporting all this flashy js and adverts by default and lets me get back to what I want to do: namely, actually reading content?
Lynx? Links? Netsurf?
Well, the first two barely display anything, including my content. I’ve never heard of netsurf though.
Its an acquired taste: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
Fittingly for this site it is primarily developed for and by RISC OS users.
Every company that gives stuff away needs a front an center page on their site that explains their business model.
The browser is central to my life these days. Why would I run a browser by a company that is giving one away with no indication how they are going to pay the bills? Either they sell it, or they are going to integrate ads, or they will try to strike a deal with a search provider like Mozilla does. Either way, be up front and maybe I could try it out.
They have, in fact, been up front about their business model. They state that they monetize search provider deals etc. very much in the way that Firefox does.
If this information is not on their website, it is bad marketing on their side. Here is my source though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ebgom/iama_jon_von_tetzchner…
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ebgom/iama_jon_von_tetzchner…
I have commented about Vivaldi here recently but that was before they released version 1.1. I am running it on Mageia Linux and I am finding pleasantly few issues with it. It has been installed on my system since the middle of last year, when I discovered it, and I am finding it a joy to use.
It is performing very fast on my current (seven-year-old) main PC and thanks to all the Chrome extensions that I can use with it, it is proving surprisingly customisable despite the fact that it is still only at version 1.1. It integrates well into my KDE4 desktop. Even the developer versions seemed to have few real issues.
As a long-time user of the old Opera (and missing my old Opera blog and other parts of that community), I follow the developments at Vivaldi with great interest. I think the only real additional features I would like to see would be:
* custom skinning
* the return of that little webserver thingy and file sharing that Opera had for a while
Otherwise – no complaints at all. Nice to see that having left Opera, Jon felt the need to do this. I for one am a really grateful Joe User.
I recommend Slimjet, a Chromium based browser but lighter in weight. It ran fine in my previous Pentium 4 computer with 1 GB RAM only