I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it's coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they're a bit TOO fixated on Opera as it was 15 years ago.<p>I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in the day. However, it's probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade. So why is such a retro throwback feature prioritized so high?<p>Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you're currently on. However, Vivaldi automatically jumps the focus over to that tab right away... because that was default Opera behavior 15 years ago. This is frequently brought up in Vivaldi forums, and the response from the devs is simply to grumble that old-school Opera was best and all other browsers today have bad defaults.<p>I'm a huge Opera fan, and have been for years. However, the thing is... I just don't WANT a re-implementation of Opera from 15 years ago. I'm sorry, but desktop email is dead for most of us. I'm sorry, but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors, and at this point those are the defaults that I expect and want other browsers to mirror.<p>You want to enable a whole new level of customization for power users? That sounds AWESOME! You want to provide some security and an alternative path forward, for Opera fans who worry about that company's ownership changes? Great! But please don't be so beholden to the Opera of 2002 that you don't make an offering well-suited for 2017.
I've been using Vivaldi now for over a year (since early beta days), and finding it a great experience.<p>A couple of things I really like - (1) that the browser chrome changes to suit the colour scheme of the website that you have loaded when flicking through tabs. Makes it really easy to identify what site you are on especially if you have scrolled down past the header. (2) that they have a slider on the bottom toolbar for zooming in/out of websites. For this old guy with failing eyesight, that is a killer feature that I use all the time.<p>Happy to also see that the number of sites reporting "You are not using an approved browser" has reduced to nearly 0 when browsing via Vivaldi, but that is more a problem for lazy web designers who only create sites specifically for a particular rendering engine, I guess.<p>EDIT: Interesting Observation - I remember that in the early days, their main selling point was their command line functionality for power users. That was what made me change over back then, although ironically I never ever use their CLI tool set at all these days, and just use the mouse like always.<p>I note that they have downplayed the CLI functionality on their current website, so perhaps it wasn't such a drawcard for other users either?!?
Glad you like our browser. We are working hard to continue to add really useful features, cool stuff and more flexibility. Our philosophy is that we all deserve a browser that works in the way we want it to. This means we listen to input and gradually add the features and options you want.<p>Cheers,
Jon of Vivaldi
As an old Opera user I really want to like Vivaldi, but the weird titlebar without title and especially the non-native menubar really turn me off (in a native menubar under Windows, once you click a menu, you can just move your mouse without clicking to navigate the rest of the menus. In Vivaldi's menubar, you can't, making the menus <i>way</i> clunkier to navigate). For this reason, I actually find the experience of Otter Browser (<a href="http://www.otter-browser.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.otter-browser.org/</a>) to be closer to Opera's than that of Vivaldi: even if Otter is more bare-bones in terms of functionality, it really gets the efficient UX feel better. I encourage old Opera fans to check it out as well.<p>I hope the Vivaldi team fixes these so I can really like it. Some of my previous turnoffs (like lack of "click tab to minimize") were implemented so I'm hopeful... although not <i>too</i> hopeful because this menu implementation has been there for quite long so they don't seem to take the menubar too seriously.
I switched to Vivaldi as my default browser 6+ months ago after new-Opera became such an overwhelming disappointment I felt I had to abandon what it had become after fifteen or more years of use. Vivaldi <i>definitely</i> has the old Opera spirit, but not the performance. On original Opera I could have hundreds of tabs open, in Vivaldi I can have 60? not such a big deal, right!? well it's partly that, partly just a constant reminder that software has become horribly inefficient even with scads of system resources - Opera always felt extremely small and efficient. Vivaldi feels big and heavy like emacs (that I also love and use) but less performant.<p>I feel that came off negatively! Vivaldi is a <i>fantastic</i> modern browser.<p>On Arch: yaourt -S vivaldi-snapshot
As a web developer using chrome and emacs all day, I was very skeptical.
Decided to give it a try and looks really good so far. It's got a lot of the good chrome stuff and so far I haven't found absolutely anything I miss.<p>So far I really like:<p>- Ctrl-P-like tab switcher / command thingy<p>- fast (but that may be just how different new browsers
always feel like at first)<p>- the web page size indicator on the address bar<p>- tabs can be configured to be wherever the hell i want them<p>- the regular, good chrome debugger<p>- can run chrome extensions straight from the store<p>I don't know who the devs are and how long this browser will be around for, but it's seriously well done!<p>Set as default.
Vivaldi is frustrating, as it nearly implements all the bits of Opera I use, but there are odd bits where it falls short<p>The main thing for me is the fact that tab minimisation doesn't work correctly, sometimes tabs you've minimised get selected, sometimes even when there are unminimised tabs. It's just wrong, and the tab handling was one of the main reasons I used Opera<p>Beyond that there's a lack of a bookmark menu, the fact that toolbars aren't customisable, no click-to-active for plugins and no site preferences, but they're less important things that don't mess up my workflow as much. Also it's rather ugly, but I fear we'll have to wait for several more years before flat design goes out of fashion to fix that.<p>I really want to get rid of my current Firefox + a load of extensions setup, especially as I haven't a clue if it'll survive Mozilla's next round of extension breaking updates. But Vivaldi just isn't quite there yet. I really want it to be...
A lot more interesting information on the Wikipedia page:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)</a><p>Looks like it uses Blink engine, first release was 8 months ago. Looks like you can also use Chrome extensions with it.
For context: behind Vivaldi there is part of the original Opera team. Vivaldi indeed really resemble to Opera 12: and that's awesome. But they are using Blink instead of the defunct Presto.
I've used Vivaldi as my primary (Chrome as secondary) browser the past 3 months (along using Vivaldi.net as my e-mail address – thank you for offering this, Vivaldi team).<p>I love the browser so far, and think it deserves many accolades for what it has and is attempting to accomplish. I do run into the occasional issues that remind me this is a newer browser, though. Mostly these are only noticeable because they completely break your concentration from what you were doing.<p>For instance, if you attempt to bookmark the current page but realize you want to put it in a new folder, then you'll have to break your flow of bookmarking by going to the Bookmarks page, create the folder, then go back to page again to add it to the newly created folder.<p>Right-clicking on a link and opening in a new tab will immediately take you to that new tab, even if you wanted to save it for after you finished the current page. There may be a chrome setting for this, but a cursory glance at the preferences window didn't show any kind of wording that would indicate "open new tab in background".<p>The only main gripe I really have is in retrieving saved passwords. Yes, I can put the URL directly into the bar and go there that way, but it's an inconvenience I don't have to deal with in Chrome (or Firefox).<p>Even with these few issues, Vivaldi has been my favorite browser these past months, and I can't wait to see how it matures.
Been using it for 6 months now and I love it. Verticals tabs were literally the only thing keeping me on Firefox.<p>Love the search bar which splits suggestions into Typed, Bookmarks, History categories.<p>So many great details and customization features in this browser.
Would switch to this immediately but it still doesn't support any sort of sync. People use browsers on multiple devices these days. Not sure why this isn't a priority for the Vivaldi team?
Coming from Firefox, it's got a very nice default UI - I love the loading animations and such. It seems easy to customize, though puzzlingly the icons don't seem to be themeable even though colors, address bar appearance, etc are - which is a bummer because the default icons are ugly Windows 8-style/Metro things.<p>Also, it seems to be implementing its own scrollbars that are stylized differently than <i>everything else</i> on my computer. Firefox also uses my GTK theme for things like checkboxes, etc (right out of the box), which is pretty cool. Vivaldi's doing some cool things, but it's still got a ways to go.
How is Vivaldi's power consumption and memory footprint? Those were the biggest motivators to switch from Chrome to Safari on macOS for most browsing (I still use Chrome for some front-end dev stuff). I can browse the web forever with Safari on my 2012 MacBook Air, Chrome not so much (haven't tried FF as a daily driver in ages so would love to hear about it too).<p>Off-topic aside: is power consumption even a concern for engineers these days? Looking at what's possible with technologies that are somewhat fringe, it's hard not to think about how much power we're gobbling up that we really don't need.
One thing i like about Vivaldi is that i can set a whole UI scaling factor. Because this makes it easy to adapt for touch input (just crank the factor up until the elements are of a practical size).<p>Just wish it didn't have frequent issues with touch screens on my Windows tablet, leading to it not responding to any input until i switch to different window and back.<p>Also, it never seems able to bring up the on-screen keyboard when tapping input areas on sites. But it comes up (unless the previously mentioned unresponsiveness kicks in) when tapping the url field.
Just gonna leave this here.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830326" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830326</a>
There are a ton of great ideas in Vivaldi's user interface. And it's built on Chrome, so you still get all the standards and extension compatibility. They regularly add clever new features that materially improve tab management and navigation. I'm looking forward to making it my default browser at some point in the future when they add sync for bookmarks etc.
I could've given it a try if it was opensource. But because it's closed I immediately classify it as vaporware, and as the browser is one of the two centers of my daily computing (the other being emacs), I won't invest in vaporware. I believe that opensourcing is the best choice of the company behind this.
Been using Vivaldi for probably a year, but I am now looking for a new browser. Too many media/crash issues have started popping up with running the browser without hardware acceleration enabled. And the options that let me disable it in the first place have been removed.<p>I guess all I really want is chrome without the tracking.
First time I heard or used Vivaldi; the whole 2-panels in 1 browser chrome side by side looked interesting, but using it, docking/undocking tabs and resizeing the area's just feels very slow, especially when you're used to how snappy Google Chrome feels. Too bad because I want to like this :)
I really like Vivaldi, but I cannot use it as my main browser because I really miss browser synchronization. With Chrome, I have everything synchronized, so setting up my browser environment I'm used to on new computer takes just few clicks. I hope Vivaldi will have this too soon.
Is it possible to arrange the tabs in the side bar in a hierarchical list view? It seems it is possible to make stacks of tabs, but the individual tabs in the hover menu are not very accessible IMHO ("out of sight, out of mind"). Otherwise this browser looks really nice.
One thing that always turns me off is the lack of proper popup support (last I checked).<p>Some addons I like don't like that and that one website I need for studying doesn't like it any more either.<p>But otherwise it's a solid browser.