By the looks of things Vivaldi is Chromium with a skin written using React, but there's no links to a repo or any API documentation as far as I can tell. The extensions page in the browser suggests it uses Chromium's extensions API which rather defeats the "Customize Everything" tag line that's all over the website. Is it possible to load in my own React components to add to the browser chrome some how?
doesn't sound like a good thing.
Adding node.js and react on the user interface may open up security issues
If it's not running in a sandbox, I'm worried about issues like these: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/04/noscript-and-other-p...
Plus it's not open source so we can't check for vulnerabilities.
e.g. having a vertical tab list out of the box is great, even when it still lacks some nice features from Tree Style Tabs.
I tried Vivaldi many times over the last year, and my conclusion is that I find it unusably slow. They take direction I like, but they chose technology that is bad (but cheap). Maybe it will get better, I surely hope so. Another nitpick of mine is that it uses WebKit (or whatever it's called now) and I hate using that.. but I do... because browser market (and perhaps web itself as a result) is in a really bad state.
What makes it different (and better in my eyes)? It's a browser usable out of the box, without any extensions. Not to say there shouldn't be any extensions, just that the basic functionality and configuration should be there.
1. For me obviously, personal preference and all.
I'm used to all these little features of the native interface and if you remove them, my productivity suffers.
Also, no MDI. Although at least the devs did a good job including the "click current tab to go to previous tab" option. 80% of my use of MDI in classic Opera was to do that.
On the other hand it's also Webkit-based at the moment, because everything seems to be... the architecture is multi-engine though.
For me Opera wasn't great because it had bundled irc/torrent/mail clients. I couldn't care less about those. It was great because it was stable, fast, small, memory efficient. No other browser was even close at that time (2012 they neded iirc?). Had all the things you want - content blocker, ui/input customization, great tab/window management, "inspector",.. and I don't even know what else anymore :)
I don't think Otter will be able to achieve many of those. Partially because it uses webkit and is in no place to maintain its own fork.
Then there are frustrating things like how do I move the reload/stop button to the left? Why do have quite powerful UI customization when it doesn't allow such a simple operation?
- On OSX all browsers except Safari consume battery like crazy - In Vivaldi you can use "hibernate background tabs" and it will take a lot less resources
- Vertical tabs - I tend to have a lot of tabs open (Hibernate feature is even more handy in this case)
- Tab group tiling - I can have 2 websites open side by side in 1 browser WindowI feel like window-management is pretty much broken at this point. I can now have multiple windows, containing multiple tabs, containing multiple ... what would you call those things? Mini-windows? Pages? Panes? Anyway, we also have tiling window managers, OSX's very limited equivalent, full-screen modes that are very slightly different from maximised windows, Chrome doing its own weird UI for ripping a tab out of its window and merging it back again, Firefox's tab groups, one ordering for app-cycling, another order for window-cycling, one-or-the-other order for tab-cycling... It's all getting a bit too much.
> I feel like window-management is pretty much broken at this point. I can now have multiple windows, containing multiple tabs, containing multiple ... what would you call those things?
Are you saying that we should do all "window" management on OS level? I want to maximise screen estate, having 2 windows side by side with vertical tabs will just take way too much space on a laptop screen.
Compare the following and tell me which one do you prefer:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
The great suspender is open source, Tabs outliner is not - but it doesn't require access to all your site content (It will require access to browser history though).
Is it using webkit or something else?
Edit: Also Mozilla's Servo browser engine will use a web based user interface.
I think that if you're going to write a desktop application, you should either use your native platform's APIs or pick a GUI toolkit that can give you a native look and feel. It'll give you a fast UI that looks and behaves consistently with the rest of the user's environment.
Let's see... Vivaldi is Open Source Chromium with a bundled closed source app (Want to see that is true? Open Vivaldi task manager, kill the webview Vivaldi process, and UI disappears, but browser keeps running) to create the UI which is thanks to how it is created highly exploitable.
No thanks, go away!
After using it for an hour for my regular browsing, I noticed it uses a lot of CPU for some websites. I saw over 100% for pages where Safari chugs along with 25%. That's enough to get the fans spinning.
Also, waiting to see the promised mailer app. I still use Opera Mail for my mail but now that it is in the Chinese hands, I do not feel comfortable updating it.
Not only opera had a very nice engine of its own (not anymore in Vivaldi, though), but also great functionality and ways for customization
Vivaldi 1.0 32bit DEB
Vivaldi 1.0 64bit DEB
Vivaldi 1.0 32bit RPM
Vivaldi 1.0 64bit RPM
I don't have plans to move away from Firefox, but it's always nice to see people attempt new things.
I'm liking it so far. If you aren't crazy about Chrome's UI, it's worth a shot. Hope to see more privacy features, but right now the settings are the same as in Chrome.
And dont forget competition encourages the big browser companies to work together to maintain interoperability, not branching off to 'their software' trying to create a competitive moat or simply because they want to push the world in one direction with monopolistic power. If people have options it stops this typically negative behavior happening.
Your definition of innovation might be different, but both IE and Firefox have gone through major changes for the better ever since chrome entered the scene.