The co-founder and former CEO of Opera, Jon von Tetzchner, has released a new browser called Vivaldi.
The new browser, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, is still in its early days, but offers a number of features that loyal Opera users may remember. It sports mouse gestures for browsing and the familiar “speed dial” interface that shows your favorite tabs on the new tab page.
groups Meet Vivaldi, a new browser from the former CEO of OperaVivaldi also has some new tricks up its sleeves. Multiple tabs can be combined into one for easy browsing of related sites. For example, if you were doing research online you could group all the tabs on that topic into one to save space.
The browser is available as a pre-release version right now, and like Opera, it doesn’t actually have its own, unique rendering engine – it’s built on top of Chrome’s Blink. The idea here appears to be to return at least some of the unique Opera features to the browser space, something a number of you may be interested in.
One thing i dislike is that this browser do not follow the UI style of the rest of the OS.
It uses its own borders, scrollbars, buttons and toolbars which makes it look very out of place on all OS i have tried it.
Like Chrome and Firefox, then.
Firefox uses regular borders and scrollbars.
edit: Or at least it integrates well. But chrome is a mess.
Edited 2015-01-27 23:02 UTC
No
On top of that, with Firefox you can make it look almost normal using Classic Theme Restorer
The UI is done with regular javascript and stylesheets (css), so once they allow themes, it should be simple enough to modify to your taste.
I’m hoping they make the entire UI open and customizable.
Preferably they would open source the entire thing, so I can tinker with it and adjust everything to my taste.
Since it’s built on Chromium, it just might happen.
Been using it on and off the whole day and I like it. I love the colored tabs. It is light, and super fast. I think they really have something here. Very interested in the final release.
Got the same impression, used it all day on win and mac. Impressive.
Just tried it, slow and enormous usage of CPU was my experience. Might give it another go later as we need more browser options.
If it doesn’t get popular enough, he’ll just complain to the EU like he did last time.
Used Opera and its mail client for quite a while on my otherwise completely open source desktop. I really liked it, especially the simple mail client! However, will not go back now if it’s closed source…
Your entire computer hardware isn’t open source. You should throw it away.
Okay, a few more hours in and I’m officially addicted to grouped tabs. Google Chrome peeps: are you listening?
I’ve been an Opera fan since seeing how much faster version 2 ran than Netscape Navigator on a 386. I think some of my earliest internet arguments here, and on newsgroups before then, were about the virtues of Opera; back when features like saved browsing sessions, or a multiple document interface, were pretty much unique.
Needless to say I’ve been mourning the demise of that browser for the last year or two. Opera 12 is getting long in the tooth (and was never exactly bug free), while Firefox, even with Opera feature cloning extensions, is a poor substitute.
There is Otter Browser, an attempt to clone the Opera 12 UI, but while it has made some progress, it doesn’t exactly have a professional team behind it: http://otter-browser.org/
It’s hard not to see Vivaldi as the browser with more potential to truly replace Opera.
It’s certainly nice to see some great Opera features return. Having notes built into the browser helped make it a great research tool. They could be used as a more powerful alternative to bookmarks: create a note from an interesting online statistic/quote, write a few words to go with it (making it easy to search for), then go back to see it in context on its website by simply double clicking on the note.
I was always glad that I had Opera while I was at college. It definitely saved me some frustration and wasted time, especially as I’m not the most organised person in the world.
Obviously this developer build only has a tiny fraction of the features of Opera 12, and very little of its incredible customisability. The lack of Opera’s brilliant tab switcher (right-mouse-button+scroll wheel), or the ability to combine vertical tabs into the sidebar panel (with filtering by keyword and the ability to select and drag/close multiple tabs), are ones that I’d particularly miss. But hopefully more classic features will appear as it’s developed further.
Of course there are certain Opera features that I won’t expect to return. For me the saddest one is true MDI, rather than tabbed browsing. Even with tab stacking features, to me it’s a limited and inflexible substitute for MDI, where individual tabs could be tiled or resized, without splitting the browser into multiple windows. This was especially useful with sites that insist on stretching a single text column from one edge of a 27″ screen to the other…
Still, it’s very nice to see Vivaldi turn up as an option after so many browsers have gone minimalist on features.
Same here. I’ve been a fan of Opera for many years and wouldn’t consider using anything else unless I really, really needed to. But the move to the WebKit engine has resulted in little more than a Chrome clone.
I thought I was the only person to mourn the passing of this. An astonishingly useful feature that I used every day.
I fervently hope that Vivaldi incorporates all the “missing’ features that have been ripped out.
Some people have commented on Vivaldi looking out of place. For some of us functionality is more important than aesthetics. I’ve rather it be the visual equivalent of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick but have loads of functionality built in, than look great but need an extension system to be of any use at all.
Man, that is one ugly browser.
Anyway, I notice they have a whole team working on this browser and that means they need money. So the question is – How are they planning to monetize this?
Ads
Been using it for a few hours now, and have not seen one ad. They might do it in the future but I don’t see any yet.
This is currently a technical preview.
Preview.
Preview.
Then it will become a Payperview.
Payperview.
Payperview.
For a while classic Opera had a banner ad in the toolbar that you could pay to remove. It didn’t work out back then and I can’t see them trying it again now. I sometimes wonder if Opera would have been the Chrome of its day if they’d given it away free, rather than keeping it a commercial product for so long…
Having said that, I was happy to pay for Opera back then (I still have an official Opera installation CD around somewhere) and I’d happily pay for a better browser now. I still do a fair amount of browsing and a few $ would be well worth it for a nicer experience.
Hmmm, I’m another who paid for ad-free browsing Opera way back I just wish someone would do a good browser giving us the choice.
Something else gave me the horrors when I wandered around a bit. The registration stuff is all Google.
I backed out of there so fast you wouldn’t see me for the dust.
Call me antisocial if you like but as far as I’m concerned ALL of the “social” shit is what is truly antisocial and their owners don’t give a damn about you or me.
I paid three times in the 6-9 ages. When they screwed 10.50, I started to explore alternatives. When they abandoned 12.17, I definitively switched to FireFox, Chrome being a resource hog. IE ? What’s that ? Not relevant…